House Potter
by Black Drazon
Summary: Harry Potter & House MD crossover. Set in a modern day Hogwarts, when Dr. Wilson travels to England to seek an impossible cure, House tags along uninvited and finds himself wrapped up in magical illnesses, supernatural hurts and really annoying teenagers
1. Introduction

He bustled about the room, pacing, circling, wringing his hands and rehearsing under his breath. Oh, he'll believe me in the end, he thought to himself, but if I don't do this right there could be questions, too many questions, and hurt feelings. He circled a short table in front of a couch, whereon sat a pile of letters, a little more than half in re-recycled white envelopes, the other in slightly off-beige, more professional and expensive, all opened, all with their contents replaced, in chronological order from top to bottom. He was wearing a comfortable shirt and pants, as he had had the day off and had only just remembered, a few minutes after he made the decision to call, to tell and to share, that he was still in his pyjamas. It had been a stressful day, with only a single decision left to make. It had been made, and now he waited. He waited for the doorbell, to do the one last thing he had to do.

The phone call had been hurried, and he knew that would cost him later. There was no need to have made it: a few days before he had already been assured that everyone would be filled in, and that he didn't have to do anything himself, but he made the call all the same. In the end, the doorbell never rang, but a knock came instead. He opened it and let in the night air, and the rain.

"So, you've pussy-footed about, nervously walked away when you see me in the hallway and have finally whispered in my ear that you'd meet me in the janitor's closet after Mrs. Appleton's algebra class if I'm interested." The man from outside scowled at him. "So are we going to make out first or would you rather talk about your _feelings_?"

"That's funny, House." Wilson stepped aside and let his friend walk past. "I always assumed your first kiss came just after the words 'It'll be fifty dollars an hour, a hundred if you're planning on anything weird.'"

House pulled off his boots and stood suddenly, giving his friend a suspicious look. After a pause, he said "Interesting. That's Natasha's going rate." Wilson coughed and House walked past him, still dripping onto the floor, into the kitchen and the fridge within. "She's got a good head on her shoulders," he was heard through the door as he collected an apple and a bagged lunch before turning around. "A few months ago she adjusted for inflation and everything." Wilson lowered his eyes and snatched away the lunch and House, a look of feigned hurt on his face for a moment or two, started on his apple.

"I called you here because I'm about to go on a long trip." Wilson walked back out of the kitchen and into the living room, dropping down in the couch next to his pile of letters. "I'm not going to be back for—" Wilson was interrupted by the sound of House dragging, with his cane, a chair from the kitchen to the living room. It scrapped across the hardwood and Wilson tried to speak only once more before giving up entirely and waiting, with a look of annoyance on his face, as House pulled it across the carpet of the living room to stop across the table from his friend. He set his cane hanging from one end of it and plopped himself down, the chair facing the wrong way and he resting his arms on the backrest.

With a slight sigh, Wilson continued. "I'm not going to be back for… a year, in the short term." House's eyebrow shot up in interest and a smile slowly came to his lips.

"Oh do I get to guess? Okay, here goes. Getting away from all those annoying dying patients of yours? Getting away from Cuddy? You fought the law and the law is going to win if you don't disappear to Barbados from here till next August?" Wilson rolled his eyes, but House continued in a childish voice. "But you can't leave, Doctor Wilson, there's so much left to do, so many plot threads left hanging!"

Wilson sighed again and laid back into the couch, his arms crossed across his chest as he examined the near wall and window. "You know, this is exactly why I decided I had to tell you the truth, because if I don't, you'll just poke your nose where it doesn't belong until one day something will pop up and bite you for it."

"Ooh. Now this is interesting." House spun the chair around and sat in properly. "Alright, mommy, let's go with story time."

Wilson leaned in, over the letters, and stared his explanation. "A few months ago one of my patients was talking about how she was investigating her genealogy. She said she always wanted to look into it and the cancer was giving her a reason to track down her family while she still could. One day after a check-up with her I was… bored and decided it wouldn't be such a bad idea. I mean, who knows? It could be interesting. So I charted out what I already knew about my family tree and started investigating over a few weeks."

House's eye instinctively fell to the pile of letters on the table, and Wilson gave a short nod. "One of my ancestors was a Norbert Hellmann, a lawyer from Virginia before the Revolutionary War. He just happened to be the first branch I was able to track down. I found a family of his living in West Virginia in the old family home and started some correspondence with them."

He handed over the top five letters. As it turned out, the letters from the Hellmanns – now the Bayers, specifically a woman named Hazel – were the more expensive looking ones, and the cheaper ones belonged to the young doctor. Yet, House found, to the touch the envelopes and the letters within were actually course and rough. It was clear from the size of the envelopes that Wilson's letters had been returned with the reply.

"There's at least forty dollars in postage on this first letter," he remarked with surprise.

"Yes, she's not exactly familiar with the postal system."

House's eyebrow remained at its intrigued peak as he skimmed the letters, learning little more than his friend continued to narrate.

"We agreed that I should come to meet the family and I went up in May."

"So that's where you were. I should have known you didn't go to the beach to relax." House gestured with the letter as if to punctuate his point. "You don't know _how._" House continued to skim the letter, squinting slightly. "So what's with your sudden leave of absence? Some hot distant-cousin action coming your way from this 'Hazel'?"

"'Hazel'," Wilson imitated "has two kids and a husband."

"Never stopped me."

Wilson let that go with a momentarily confused blink. "When I had got there, it was just Hazel and the kids, but her husband Richard came home from work in the afternoon and a few of Richard's brothers came with their families to visit for a day. It turns out I'm actually related to both of them, distantly."

"Oh, so someone beat you to the incest fun machine."

Wilson continued unabated. "Hazel and her family were normal enough. I say 'enough' because Richard's brothers and their kids would make you think walking around with a banana strapped to your feet as shoes is normal behaviour. Hazel burned dinner, but one of Richard's sister-in-laws acted like she had never seen a fork. Their little girl, Sally, was overprotective of her room, but I could constantly hear her cousins raising hell, but when they'd hear someone walking through the halls towards them they would suddenly scamper about and I'd find them in an empty room with their hands behind their backs, looking way too innocent. And then they'd get in trouble for it!"

"Oh, why be so suspicious, Wilson? There's nothing suspicious about some young kids in an empty room making a lot of noise and stopping when an adult shows up."

"Must everything be about sex with you?"

"You were the one that brought up incest."

"I was not!"

House, bored with the last of the five letters he had, made a grab for the first of a substantially larger pile only to find Wilson blocking his way with a hand.

"Clearly I was missing something but I put it out of my mind. Then, on the last day I was there, one of the kids runs screaming down the hallway… You're not going to believe me." House looked up from the letters he had been glaring at as if they would suddenly snap open on the floor. "I can tell. You're… not going to believe a word of it."

Shaking his head, Wilson reached into a tin he kept on a side table and tossed something from it to House. House caught it and gave his friend a look. "The kids were running down the hall away from a glass ball?" He tossed it back. "Terrifying." Wilson snorted so that House could not hear it and held the ball up. "Anyways," House went on. "You were right. I don't believe that for a second."

Wilson just gestured towards the ball with his head and House, annoyed but compliant, took another bite from his apple and took a closer look. There was a short pause when, all of a sudden, a small cloud of grey smoke filled the ball as if spewing from its centre.

"Well…" House stopped mid-chew. "That's 'conservation of mass'-defyingly interesting."

"I found this on Sally's floor after she was injured in the thing you won't believe. She had a few cuts on her leg and I insisted on tending to them, so to distract her from the alcohol I snapped up one of her toys."

"Cuts and scrapes on a child? You're right, James, I find myself believing this less and less with every word."

"She was attacked by a suitcase."

"She _what?_"

Wilson seemed fairly smug about the reaction.

"She… what?" House was more perplexed by the sincerity on Wilson's face than the statement. "Are you sure this story doesn't start with 'I found these gnarly shrooms in their backyard…'?"

"No. Suitcase. Attacking children. It was opening and closing like it had a mouth and… vibrating itself to move. I shut the door on it and made sure the kids were safe. The strangest part was that Richard seemed angrier at his oldest nephew than confused at the suitcase thing. That was when I noticed Sally was cut and I insisted on treating her, even though Hazel felt she could handle it. I wanted to be sure, I mean… a _suitcase bite?_ I guess I wanted to prove to myself it was real."

House sat back in his chair, looking around the room as if for empty bottles of beer. Wilson continued. "All of a sudden there was a man in the hallway. I don't know who he was, I hadn't seen him before and he got there fairly fast to deal with a problem we had just discovered, but that seemed to be what he was there for. He only seemed to open the door before I stopped hearing the suitcase bang itself against it. Then he came back to talk to Richard. I started back on Sally and it was just then that I noticed the ball." He held it up again as a point of reference. "Richard and the man are talking in the hallway for a while, about me it sounded like, so I decided getting back to work was the most conspicuous thing to do. There was too much weird going on and I didn't want any part of it, frankly."

Wilson paused, half for drama, half because, again, he knew House was not going to believe him. "The man walks in and sees me with Sally. He's holding this long stick in his hand and says 'Sorry, doc, but there's rules and stuff, you know?' and he points this stick at me and Sally just… _juts _out of the way like he had a gun. But the man just stands there, looking at me, and slowly lowers his stick and says, very confused, 'How many toes on a Bowtruckle?'"

House, more than being confused, seemed more and more amused with every word. He was like a frat boy being entertained by the escapades of one of his brothers the Monday afterward. The word "Bowtruckle" seemed particularly amusing to him.

"When I don't say anything, he asks another. 'What are the magical properties of shark teeth?'" House was laughing now. "Oh, you may think this is funny, but it wasn't. He looks at me, totally confused, then to the ball and the red smoke in it—"

"Grey smoke. That ball has grey smoke in it."

"It has grey smoke in it _now_. In fact, that's his next question. 'You forgetting something important, doc?' And… that doesn't make any sense to you. Point is: he gestures for me to wait one minute and steps out to talk to Richard and Hazel. He _threatens _me—"

"With a _stick?_" House laughed.

"He threatens me and asks me to 'Wait one minute'! Oh, and I appreciate the concern."

"I'm sorry!" House managed between chuckles.

"Well, _I_ was pacing about the room when all of a sudden Sally says 'Are you a Squib?'" House laughed so far he all but fell off his chair. Somehow, he managed to get out an explosion gesture with his hands in reference to "squib". Wilson, trying to keep his temper, continued the best he could. "At that, the man opens the door slowly and he, Richard and Hazel are staring at Sally like she just discovered general relativity.

"It gets complicated from here—"

"It's _not _yet?"

"…so I'm just going to skim it. The point is… oh, mail's here."

House pulled himself together slowly, his smile slowly melting into a scowl as he realised he had no idea what Wilson was referring to. Then, to the right, he heard a rapping on the window. He turned slowly and saw, perched precariously on a narrow ledge, a tiny saw-whet owl with a tube strapped to its leg.

"That's John Henry. He's not really big enough to carry the mail but he manages anyways." Wilson opened the window and the tiny owl flittered in and, chirping, bounced into Wilson's hand. The oncologist reached over and popped a lid off of the tube on the owl's leg, withdrawing a thin photograph, which he handed to House before turning back to the kitchen.

As Wilson pulled a piece of ground meat from his fridge, House looked at the photograph, and saw a small family of four staring back at him. And they waved. He stared at, perplexed yet drawn to the flat piece of paper, which he held and examined from all angles.

"The Bayers…" Wilson started from the kitchen, jabbing finger in the direction of the photo. "And the Hellmanns, for that matter, are something called Wizards." Wilson came back to the living room with two beers, and he handed one to House, who did not look up from the photo that he was now bending and scratching lightly. "Wizards, apparently, have lived among us for centuries, but in their own sub-culture. As a matter of fact, I'm not even supposed to tell you but, like I said, I figured you'd just stick your nose in too deep and get it bitten off. Maybe even literally, come to think of it. Now that you know it'll just come out as far too many 'fairy' jokes in my direction in front of your team.

"The short of it is that my family line it seems to have died out and their decedents, including me, were sort of left out of the loop for their own good. But when the man that came to deal with the suitcase saw this ball working for me, he thought something was up."

Wilson looked up and realised House was still paying most of his attention to the moving photo. The Bayers were still waving in a cycle, like a broken record, but they moved from time to time, mostly to duck House's probing finger. Wilson, with a slightly disinterested tone in hopes of getting his friend's attention, continued. "He investigated me he found out I was actually a 'Squib'."

At the sound of the funny word, House's attention returned, just as planned. "How does this work?" Well, almost.

"Magic. They use their wands and can do… amazing things, which is what I'm here to talk about." He sat back down and wait for House to ignore the photo long enough to sit down as well. When he finally did, which took a while, he got to the point. "You see, a 'squib' is someone that descended from a wizard but has no magical powers. Or at least, that's the general definition. I, on the other hand, have very weak magical powers. I'm no wizard, but I'm not a normal person, either. When I was talking to the man that was orienting me with too much information about the Wizarding world, he said that, with the proper training, I might be able to do some small things."

Wilson sighed. "Now up until this point I had lost all interest in this little world of theirs, in my genealogy, and everything, I just wanted to get back home. But he happened to ask what I did for a living and I told him 'doctor'. Well, he didn't seem all that impressed with that so I specified 'oncologist' and talked to him about cancer. House… they've cured it."

Now House was listening, though the picture stayed tight in his hand as Wilson went on. "In fact, it was so low on their priority list that I wouldn't have gotten a reaction from him at all if I hadn't described some magical affliction his sister once had involving… tentacle roaches, I didn't quite follow. The point is… with this training, I could do it. The little push, the little bit of magic could… I could cure cancer!"

House let the picture fall, purposefully. "Wait, you've discovered an age old conspiracy and are willing to toss it all off in the name of personal glory?" Wilson's face fell at the accusation of selfishness. "I could… kiss you! I'm so proud!"

Wilson groaned. "I don't know how I'd do it. I guess half of me hopes that I'll learn something from the magic that will give me a real cure, and the other half is saying 'C'mon James, we can do this, one way or another, we can…' I could save people with no hope in the world; I could do… a lot of good!"

"Wait, so… assuming this works, you're going to abandon a whole slew of patients _who need you_ for an entire year."

Wilson paused, awkwardly. "S-seven. Seven years. I get the summers off." House actually laughed at this. "If it makes it any funnier for you, the other first year students are going to be eleven years old." It seemed to. "There's a wizard school in—"

"Salem?"

"Northern Manitoba," Wilson said, lying through his teeth and hoping House was too bemused to notice.

"_Canada? _Cuddy agreed to send you to _Canada_ for _seven years_ for medical training?" It was hard to tell whether House was laughing or angry.

"I told her I'm going to be part of an experimental study, and besides, I've been to school in Canada before. Listen, House, you can see the value in this. Cancer is the world's biggest puzzle, I could _solve_ it. Surely you can appreciate _that!_ And who knows what else I could do with that kind of knowledge? Besides, you can't change my mind." He pushed at the stack of letters. "They've already accepted me."

House rummaged through the pile and found the acceptance letter in the bottom of the pile. He read it over twice and looked not to Wilson but to the photograph, which continued to wave at him. He looked up then to his friend with a wicked grin on his face. "So when do we leave?"

Wilson took some time to take that in. "W-we? _We _aren't going anywhere. _I_ am going in a week to buy my new school things."

"Oh come on, this sheet says you can bring a rat, I have a rat! _I'm perfect_."

"They're not going to let you in because of Steve MacQueen, you're not a wizard!"

"Neither are you!" House was grinning; he was far too amused, far too intrigued. "You can't wave the world's greatest Rubik's Cube in front of me and then take it away because only you can turn it!" He picked up his cane and moved for the door. "I'll talk to Cuddy in the morning and mail your school," he held up the envelope from the acceptance letter, "right afterward. I may not be able to mix toe of frog with lipstick of Jersey whore like you can but I can still learn _theory_. See you in class!"

"House!"

"Sorry, can't hear you! There must be eye of newt in my ear!"

And he was gone. Wilson rolled his eyes and groaned, sitting back down in his chair. He picked up the letter again and read it one more time.

"You knew this would happen, James," he muttered to himself, as, just beyond the door, he could just make out a voice say "Obliviate!". "You knew this would happen."

* * *

House's eyes snapped open to face the alarm. Nine thirty. Hm, he thought. Not late enough. And he shut them again.

After a pause, his eyes opened again and stared at the clock. He squinted and the digital lines blurred and meshed. He could not quite make out the numbers and, as perhaps an example of his tired state, was having trouble processing exactly what it was he was looking for. No, no he thought. The numbers were definitely green.

He took to his feet and cane, staggering across the room to the clock and lifted it to his face. Yup, still green. Groaning, he pulled himself over to his armoire and pulled on some pants. He knew it was going to be a long day; the trouble was that had no idea why. It had been a long night too, he thought. Or had it? Come to think about it, House was not exactly sure what he had been up to last night. It was a giant blank, a total gap.

He shrugged. Must have been fun.

* * *

"I have to say, Dr. Wilson, that while this was all quite unorthodox in the beginning, but I feel that we here at Hogwarts are ready to take on a student of your… considerable circumstances."

Professor McGonagall smiled at him across the table. Being able to speak to another human being at the level of a relative equal, instead in the teacher-student, teacher-angry-parent level, was remarkably relaxing for her on that stressful opening day, and she risked some content emotion.

"Well, I'd just appreciate any help you'd be willing to give."

"Of course, of course. By the way, how did things go with your friend? Goodbyes can be so hard."

"No, that's all right." Wilson rolled his eyes. "I told him I was going to school in Canada just to throw him off before I remembered you had that Obliviator standing outside the door."

The headmistress gave him a thin smile. "Old habits do die hard, I suppose. But now, on to other things, I suppose we should move on to the schedule now."

"Please."

Picking through neatly arranged piles of parchment arranged across her desk, Professor McGonagall selected a crisp sheet bearing a carefully aligned chart, which she handed to him. Wilson, inwardly amused that the professor's neat script was so small that only a doctor could work it out, skimmed straight to the bottom. "Now, as you can see, the children will be arriving in a few hours. I'd like you to meet them in the Great Hall, with the rest of the school, just to avoid making repetitive explanations to the students that don't already know. After that, you'll be able to sit at the Hogwarts House table."

Some of the portraits of the room, which Wilson had been ignoring to this point, far too confused by their ability to move and change expressions to keep up with them, began to roll their eyes. Professor McGonagall batted an annoyed hand at them and scoffed, as if they were all brushing past a long repeated argument.

"May I… ask what's the matter?"

"Oh…" McGonagall replied, who had made the action so casually she seemingly surprised he had noticed. "Some of the late Headmasters still do not approve of our new sorting policies."

"Don't mind them, Minerva," said a thin, greasy-haired man whose portrait hung to one side at the back of the room. "Most of them have gone more than their fair time without having to face the prospect of _change_."

"Most definitely," replied the current Headmistress, lowering her eyes to a blank piece of paper before her, quill in hand, as if she did not want to grant the argument her presence. Wilson could not help but feel left out.

"Which… policy is that? I certainly hope this has nothing to do with me."

McGonagall sighed slightly and lifted her head. "I'm sorry Dr. Wilson. No, no, this has nothing to do with you. It's simply… some of the more… conservative members of the British Wizarding community aren't very pleased with some changes I've made to the school's sorting policies. Here in Hogwarts, you see, there are four Houses that serve to help organize and group the students by personality: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw and Slytherin." And then, a slight tinge of a smile forming on one side of her mouth, she said: "Building on the ideas and advice of a close friend, I moved the sorting up to the end of first year, to give the students a time together, in Hogwarts House, to give them a chance to develop, to become more of… themselves!" She shook her head. "I'm sure you, as a physician, can understand the huge number of changes a child can go through in these early years!"

He nodded. "Of course!"

"A year! Hardly what I wanted, but it was the most I was able to nudge it, what with the storm of protests. Owls and Howlers and meetings with the Ministry and ugh!"

"Don't fret yourself, Minerva," came another voice from the back wall. Centred quite intentionally and prominently hung a golden frame, and in it a portrait of an old man with a great white beard and a crooked nose. He nodded to Wilson in greeting, and then continued: "I think I can say quite surely that in the past few years our Gryffindors have never been more brave, our Hufflepuffs more industrious, our Ravenclaws more bright and our Slytherins more…" A pause, punctuated with a slight twinkle in his eye. "…Resourceful."

Across the wall, the greasy-haired man gave a groan, though McGonnigal nodded to the older man and smiled.

"Thank you, Albus. Now, Dr. Wilson, I'm afraid I'm running straight out of time." She took to her feet, shaking a small pile of papers straight and flat. "As we all realise, you're probably more than finished going through puberty yourself, so I hope you won't mind staying with Hogwarts House for your first year all the same. It will give you a chance to associate with your future classmates."

"I'd be glad too." He stood himself and held out a hand. "And I want to thank you, again, for the opportunity."

She took the hand and shook it. "I can only hope we'll be of some use to someone in your circumstances. Oh, and that reminds me, you'll be meeting with Madame Pomfrey once a week to get started on your healer training. I know it's a bit early but your circumstances considered, I'm sure you'll understand." He nodded and she raised her wands slightly towards the door, which opened quietly behind him. "Good luck to you, Dr. Wilson. I'm hoping we can expect the best from you."

* * *

Before he had touched down in England once again, Wilson had expected that Hogwarts would look, with the necessary Wizardy touches, like Oxford, which he had visited once in his youth before settling on McGill. Now that he was there, in the Great Hall, he realised he had guessed quite wrong. Hogwarts was nothing like he had ever seen: the Great Hall itself was lined with tapestries and careful brickwork, furnished with six tables, four facing lengthwise down the room and headed by a great tapestry depicting four separate coats of arms, and two width-wise. Wilson stood between those two tables, flanked by the jovial and talkative Deputy Headmaster, Professor Slughorn.

"I think the start of term feast is the most remarkable part of the Hogwarts year, my dear James." James, he called him. Always James. "There was always a time in my retirement," it was the third time he had mentioned his retirement, "always at this time of year, that I would feel a pang in my gut, if you'd believe it. Not for the food, of course. The food is delicious, best in the world, I'd say! But if I wanted good food I could always visit O'Reilly's in Cornwall. I taught O'Reilly myself, of course. He was never much interested in shrinking solutions or vanishing draughts, but one day he and I stumbled on an anti-Gnome formula that tasted marvellous on chicken. Don't ask," he added with a slight shudder. "So, naturally, O'Reilly will have me brought right to my booth beside the kitchen, whenever I'm in the neighbourhood. Great boy. What were we talking about?"

The room was filling with students, slowly but steadily, dressed in their wizard robes and the occasional hat, and Wilson felt suddenly less ridiculous in his own slightly oversized new robe. Already he was attracting some errant eyes, and wearing a full set of Muggle clothes would have probably drawn the whole room to him.

"Ah, yes, the feast! Like I was saying, it's not the feast so much as the children. Seeing their delighted faces looking forward to a new year of education; untapped talent and ability just waiting to be discovered! Why, just this morning on the train here I met a delightful young woman who can do remarkable things with light. Of course I always knew she had it in her, that's why I never set out to overwhelm her with too much of my help in Potions class. Have to keep the mind clear for Charms and Transfiguration, after all! It all just reminds me why I haven't returned to retirement: there's so much left for me to do, you see! I have to do my part for the youth of the world, and for remarkable people like you, of course, James!"

Assembling in the seats on one of Wilson's sides were the teachers, from the tiny Professor Flitwick to giant Professor Hagrid. They looked at him too, though they had the sense not to gawp like their younger charges. To the other side, at a table marked with the Hogwarts coat of arms, sat a group of nervous looking second-years, who eyed the four tables behind them with apprehension. They were, as far as Wilson understood, to be sorted into those houses in just a few moments, and even as he thought of it a plump woman, with whom he had not yet been introduced, came into the room carrying a stool and a ragged hat. Behind her trailed a pack of small first years, none much older than eleven, who looked about the room in sheerest awe. Professor Slughorn disappeared far faster than Wilson thought him capable.

"Gather around, gather around," said the witch, who filed the second from the Hogwarts House table to the front of the room, and set down the stool. "Now," she said as a few older students indicated to the first years that they were to take the seats at Hogwarts House. "As I call out your names, please take a seat on the stool and place the Sorting Hat on your heads."

The proceedings that took place did so with a hushed, respectful silence, broken intermittently by, to Wilson's initial surprise, the hat itself, which would shout out the name of one of the four houses after an inconsistent period on the head of the student. This call was followed by raucous cheering and applause from the students of the house just named until the next name was called and the silence resumed. With no idea of what was really going on, Wilson, who stood by one wall of the room, not far from the table decorated in red and gold, wandered the room with his eyes, and settled on a strange wizard who stood precisely across from him, by the table decorated with green and silver. He was a tall man, with stark white-blond hair and matching thick, ebony walking staff. The man acknowledged Wilson's questing eyes with a slow nod and a wry smile, and Wilson nodded in return.

After "Yeel, Brian" became a Gryffindor and the room had calmed down at last, Professor McGonagall took to her feet and gestured for quiet, cleared her throat, and spoke to the room with a commanding voice.

"Welcome, one and all, to a new year of learning here at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry! I have a number of start of term announcements, the first of which concerns—" There was a hollow clack then, the sound of wood against stone, and McGonagall lowered her eyes. "Yes, Mr. Malfoy?"

The man who stood across the room smiled at her then, and spoke to the room instead of her. "It's really nothing, Headmistress. It's just that the Board of Governors has expressed that they would rather I speak to the students on this issue. For publicity reasons, I'm sure." And while Wilson could not see, the man gave a smile that dripped with artifice.

"Well, if it is the will of the Board of Governors," McGonagall stood aside with a sarcastic sweeping motion and waited as the pale man took her place.

"Thank you, Headmistress. Students of Hogwarts School, the Board of Governors would like to make the following announcement." As he spoke, with fully enunciated flourish, he pulled a strip of parchment from his cloak and read from it specifically. "The Board of Governors would like to welcome a student to its first-ever 'Mature Student Program', from the United States, a Mr. James Wilson..." He lowered his eyes to the paper quite deliberately, and then raising them to Wilson directly he finished with an exaggerated sense of surprise: "…Ph.D!"

He then offered a stiff hand in Wilson's direction, and with the gaze of the entire school settled on him, Wilson crossed the hall and took the hand. It felt cold, but he shook it firmly, making sure to meet the eyes of the strange figure. When the man released his grip he gestured casually to the Hogwarts House table, and took to crossing back to his original spot. Wilson found himself nestled between a small girl with mousy hair and the empty head of the table. The former looked up at him with confused eyes, and he tried to calm her with a smile, but her blank reaction made it clear it was a bit too early to try to make friends.

While Professor McGonagall took back her place and speech with a presence, Wilson caught notice that the strange man had stopped on his trip back to the side of the room. Not normally one to eavesdrop, he could not help but notice that the man he had stopped behind, Professor Hagrid, seemed to fidget and squirm, and was making a definite point not to turn around.

"…Hagrid." The man said after a pause. Wilson could barely hear him clearly enough. Hagrid seemed to wince.

"Draco." Another pause. "How's your father these days?" He seemed to ask with no conviction whatsoever.

"Oh, retirement treats him well enough." There was another, longer pause. Professor McGonagall started to explain something about a forest that Wilson, straining to overhear the whispered conversation between the stranger and the giant professor, missed entirely. The man, Malfoy, broke it, saying in a voice that was a mix of pity and irritation: "Hagrid. Bygones, Hagrid."

"No, Draco. Not yet. Maybe not ever."

Pause again. "I suppose… that is your right," said the man who, without any further words, took steps away from the table to his original spot.

He never made it: at that exact moments the doors to the great hall flew wide with a great bang, and a figure, standing in the doorway, took slow steps up the hall.

"_That!_" proclaimed the figure as he started. "…was _very_ clever!"

Wilson could not believe his eyes. Neither, it would seem, could Professor McGonagall. But there it was: Greg House was dragging himself down the Great Hall, irrepressible grimace across his entire face.

"Of course, I might have not noticed if I hadn't left myself a note on my Blackberry. You people are smart but if you don't start checking people for digital recorders, you're going to make a lot more mistakes." And then, as if surprised: "Hi Wilson!"

"Mr. House, I presume," said Professor McGonagall in a commanding voice, "I'm not sure how much I care about how you got here, because it has little to no bearing on your immediate future. You will—"

"You know, it's interesting, your warts aren't half as large as I had expected."

"You will—"

"I'll have to go back and correct that Halloween costume immediately."

McGonagall fumed. "You will be leaving immediately, and with a far more competent and Muggle-oriented Obliviator!"

House, who had rounded the table, began to gesture with his cane. "Oh, now let's not _fight_. Wilson gets to play nice with all the jailbait, and I'm not going to cause any trouble. I can… wave a stick around and wear a funny hat just as well as the rest of you."

As if to punctuate his point, House caught up the Sorting Hat with his cane and, before anyone could stop him, propped it, lopsided, on his head.

"Ah!" shouted the hat. House, rather surprised, raised an eyebrow. "A Muggle? Now this should be interesting."

"Now that's certainly enough—"

"No, no, Headmistress, I can handle this. Now let's see…" the room around the hat was silent as could be, and the hat seemed to lean forward on the head of the confused-looking Muggle as it spoke. Then it balked, suddenly. "Hah! Gryffindor or Hufflepuff indeed!" and then shook from side to side as if chuckling. "No, no," said the hat, as if all sense of propriety and silence had been lost. "I think I'm torn between a driven quest for knowledge…" House seemed pleased at that. "…and a complete, borderline psychopathic disregard for the rights of his fellow human beings." Even though the hat leaned in as he said it, House seemed even more pleased with that.

"Well," said the hat, perking up a bit. "I suppose he's going to drive someone crazy, so it might as well be the people who understand it. Let's make it… RAVENCLAW!"

There was a deathly silence, save for a few broken claps from the first years and a loud smile from House, who was most certainly proud of himself. Wilson wished he could crawl under the table or hide behind the girl beside him.

"Pro…Professor McGonagall," managed Slughorn. "That hat doesn't mean… this man is actually a student now…" He seems to twich. "Does it?"

"Certainly not!" said the Headmistress, drawing her wand. "Now, Mr. House, I think it's high time you step out of this room and—"

"Leave?" said House, feigning surprise. "But I just got here!"

"That is hardly—"

"You know, it's been a long time since a woman pointed her stick at me." Wilson felt himself shrink away at the words, and knew that House turned to face him. "It's not a story I like to tell, I'll admit."

McGonagall had had more than enough, and levelled her wand and shouted "OBLIVI—"

"Wilson needs a partner!" House shouted, not flinching. McGonagall's eyes lowered, but so did her wand and House took on a look of triumph. From the far side of the room, then, came a soft clapping sound. Wilson looked up, once more, to see the smiling face of the stranger, Draco Malfoy.

"Bravo, Mr. House. I daresay I was expecting you. Oh, don't look so surprised, Headmistress." Wilson couldn't help but note that McGonagall did not look the least surprised. No, if he had to put a finger on it, he would have called it blind rage. "Mr. House is famed for his deductive reasoning. You would know that if you had read all the reports. In fact, I'm not surprised to see him in Ravenclaw, though I can't help but feel I've lost another potentially great Slytherin." Hagrid, for reasons Wilson could not imagine, seemed to grimace. "So, doctor. You say your friend Dr. Wilson needs… a partner?"

House considered the stranger for a moment, tilting his head as he so often did, before smiling. "Professional opinion."

Draco, for theatrics only, spread his arms and cane wide as if yielding the floor. "Then I see no reason to object. Important research is about to begin, Professors, students. And I don't claim to understand it. I say we let Dr. House play his part and see how things… play out."

He stepped back, and Wilson found himself looking from House to McGonagall and back to House again. There was a soft, hidden contest of wills there for a moment, and McGonagall seemed to be grinding her teeth. And then, as if completely bored, House turned about.

"Well, since that's all over, I think I'll go take my spot. Under the giant blue bird?" He pointed as he asked and walked towards it anyways. He took four steps before McGonagall stopped him.

"Mr. House!"

He stopped, the room was quiet, and McGonagall's face crunched tight with ferocity. But then...

"The hat, Mr. House. Return it."

House, grinning, happily obliged, flipping the hat with a flourish, lifeless to its stand, and walked off towards the Ravenclaw table with an unshakable grin and a spring in his steps.

"I get to sit with the big kids!" he said to Wilson with a smile like the Joker himself, and took immediately to seat between two older-looking Ravenclaw girls.

And so it was that Greg House and James Wilson became students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. And as the food was served and the discussions closed, the latter looked across his steak and wings and smiled.

* * *

_Hi ! I had this little present for a friend of mine lying around and decided to use my FictionPress cross-site account to throw it onto this page! Being a canon-adherent, I have to point out that this was written before Deathly Hallows was released (and definitely before Jo said that McGonagall wouldn't be Headmistress for this long!), so that should explain that mistake! And that's all! Bye!_

_August 17 2008: A friend of mine points out that Wilson went to McGill in Montreal, so I made a few changes to the text. A few days ago I took out a joke from a few seasons ago that didn't make sense any more, too._

_April 4, 2009: Re-filed using the new Crossover feature.  
_


	2. A Stopper in Death Part 1

"Now remember to be careful handling the solution after the third stir," Slughorn said with an elaborate, almost scripted, twinkle in his eye. "Because after that point, you see, is when it takes its first step towards becoming a love potion."

The class, as a whole, took a deep breath. There was an audible tension in the air, pressing down on the fourth years like a heavy sheet. Furtive, surreptitious glances were shot between classmates, enemies, and nearly all but the most platonic of friends. They all sent out vibes of irrational and unwarranted distrust throughout the room, distrust that whirled about the fumes from their cauldrons with elaborate, detailed imaginings and fears in their heads, steaming and boiling over. Slughorn was oblivious.

"Now, please put on your dragonskin gloves and collect a single ashwinder egg each," instructed the Potions master, pointing to the centre of the room where rested an old iron cauldron, which glowed from within with a soft orange light.

"You get it," Alice, one of the Gryffindors, hissed at her labmate, a gangly boy who had yet to grow into his height, both of them standing bolt-straight with tension.

"Me?" Clayton looked at her over his shoulder, face stricken. "I-It's your turn. I got the… t-the…" he looked down at the potion in front of him, suddenly realising he had completely forgotten the ingredients so far. "I… went to that git Josh Kiryu's birthday yesterday to keep you from being alone with all his Slytherins. Doesn't that count for something?"

"Oh, just get it," she said, unconsciously grinding her teeth. "It's just an egg."

"It's an egg that'll burn a hole through your hand and turns into a love potion. How on earth is that 'just an egg'?"

"Just do it, Clayton!"

He shook his head but his feet started moving anyways, and soon he found himself at the edge of the old cauldron, gloves on, staring inside at the strange cluster of soft, round balls. He reached in carefully and found the eggs were more delicate than he had expected. He pulled out two of them, and they rolled in his hand, so close to the edge that he had to cup the other in to catch it, and felt like he had almost squashed the two of them by the simple gesture. Carefully balancing the two of them, he stepped back towards his desk.

They were pretty little things, a soft translucent pink with a small crescent-shape blob in the middle of the yolk that glowed like the filament of a bulb, bent and amplified by the slim layer of magical frost that encased them. Its soft glow caught his eye and kept it strong, and he barely heard Slughorn as he walked.

"Now, you'll need to put the egg in its entirety. We will be dissolving the shell later on but for now it's too dangerous to break the freezing. Careful now!"

"Hey. Hey you."

Clayton looked up and saw Alice looking at him with a scowl. "Come on, stop staring at the things and let's get to work."

He nodded and turned towards her, handing her his egg and placing it in the previous prepared solution, all held in a clear glass vial with a long neck and a wide bottom until they were ready to be put under the heat of a cauldron.

"I think you'll all appreciate this if you wait for just a moment," their teacher said with a grin, as about the classroom decanters filled with a cloudy potion base were mingled with the viscous-even-when-frozen ashwinder eggs, which seemed to catch the cloudy base with their energy, such that slowly, gently, the entire set of potions began to glow. Slughorn gestured with his hands, dimming the torchlight about the room – anyone looking away from the potions would have noticed that he seemed unable to get them to snuff out entirely – and soon the room was lit by the radiant glowing potions in a brighter version of the orange that had come from the cauldron of eggs. Mesmerized yet again, Clayton carefully lifted up the glass container and held it up, where it lit the dark crevices of the ceiling and cast about the room, seemingly brighter than the others. Slughorn's smile was irrepressible.

"Ah, yes, and how very appropriate. It's like love itself, isn't it, spreading, filling every corner of the room, brightening the lives of those who look upon it," he waxed, and shaking his head as if at some happy memory, he turned his back to the class for just a moment to check the large potions book he kept on his desk. As if they had waited for him to look away, certain potions, including the one in Clayton's hand, began to glow even fiercer, and Alice and he and the rest of the class all watched open-mouthed as the growing spectacle. For a brief moment there was silence, broken only by the softest sound, not unlike an ashwinder itself, hissing.

And then the screaming started.

Slughorn wheeled to see Clayton drop the glass too late – the mostly empty glass. Before it hit the ground one could see the hole in its side, the red-hot edges where glass had been burnt away, and only a few drops of the mixture remained. Perhaps only Alice saw what had actually happened, seen the potion burn through and spurt out of the steaming hole in the glass like a fountain, but there was no one in the class that could not draw their own conclusion as other vials started to burst at their bottoms, their burning contents catching fire on the desks and slowly starting to sear through. All eyes, though, were on Clayton, who was on the floor, rolling in agony.

He screamed again and again before Alice came to her senses and dropped to her knees beside him. His gloved hands were at his face, they attacked his face, pulling and brushing and holding as he screamed through, by and past them, and she reached out to hold his wrist and stop his savage attack of his own face. As she pulled it away he met her eyes, his stretched wide with pain and terror, and she saw what he was trying to prevent. The ashwinder solution has struck him on the cheek after he hit the ground. He bled from the back of his head from the impact, but his face was covered in the stuff, and it burned like oil. It streaked across his features, around his nose and into his mouth, flames caught through his hair and across the impact wound, and as she pulled away his hands the air hit the flames and they shot up towards her, and she dropped the hands with a screech.

Then Slughorn was there, all at once. He caught his hands again and pulled out his wand when another student, one of the other Gryffindors, came to his side to help hold Clayton down. Alice saw it then, on his face, the small red spark, the embryonic ashwinder, caught in the midst of a harsh blue flame, its death throes terrible and ruinous.

"Miss Stone," he said to her, his voice half trembling, half commanding, "quickly, get Madame Pomfrey, hurry!" He turned back to Clayton, who thrashed more and more, a Slytherin holding down his left hand now. Alice's breath was caught in her throat; her feet clung to the floor. "Miss Stone!" he shouted when he found her there, and she ran to the door.

"_Soffoquoi!_" he heard Slughorn cry from behind, and the flash of his magic lit up the hall. But nothing happened, and there was still screaming. There was still screaming in the dungeon halls, on the stairs and for every step, screaming, screaming from far beyond where she could have possibly heard.

* * *

House Potter: Year 1

A Stopper in Death

* * *

In the upper floors of Hogwarts Castle, the dark of evening settled in, and students returned in various groups to their house common rooms before curfew. The picture-folk bade passers-bye good night, except for those who had gathered at the painting of Montalban the Six-Fingered, where a rousing game of Exploding Snap (1642 rules) had carried on far into the evening, and continued to go even after the painting had been shook to the ground by the game and was now face-down on the Hogwarts floor, leaving the players in the dark, and, by the sounds of things and the occasional burst-assisted hop of the painting a few inches into the air, still playing.

Elsewhere there was a general quiet. From the dungeons to the upper floors, from the Forbidden Forest to the hog-decorated gate, there was the gentle hum of a settling night. Hagrid was just finished with a large fire outside his hut, having dumped the remains of his meal into it before smothering it carefully, while the Dark Forest around his seemed almost to sleep for an hour before the creatures of the night awoke. In the Slytherin common rooms, the out-looking windows, charmed to show something better than the lake they rested beneath, settled into an enchanted moonlit sky. In Gryffindor Tower, the students settled around the fireplace for conversation and homework. And so it was about the school, from top to bottom and bottom to top.

Except just outside Ravenclaw Tower.

"You're going about this entirely wrong, how about you try thinking about it from the beginning?"

"How about you just _let me in?_"

Greg House paced back and forth in front of the hidden door to the Ravenclaw tower, his walking stick a harsh staccato beat against the sound of his footsteps, echoing in the quiet.

"Salamanders. Owl droppings. Magic… bedknobs… I don't _know!_ What do you _want_ from me?"

"The answer," replied the door knocker, in its never-endingly calm, irritating tone. "I can repeat the question if you'd—"

"Jack-o-lanterns!" bellowed the Muggle in defiant reply. "Pointy hats! Flying brooms! I can think of witch imagery all day, you know! Thumb screws, death by crushing, appearing butt naked in front of a sex-starved puritan tribunal so that they can 'look for birthmarks'!"

The knocker rolled its eyes. "Oh now you're just being crude."

"Candy corn?"

"Oh, now I'm afraid _I_ don't follow."

House stormed back to his pacing, back and forth for almost another minute until Professor Flitwick came up the corridor.

"Oh! Good evening Mr. House!" said the diminutive Professor with a pleased look on his face, quite unrelated to the situation at hand, though he quickly took it in and leaned forward with a grin. "Having a little trouble with today's question, are we?"

"Not as much trouble as that thing's going to have if it doesn't let me in."

Flitwick just laughed. "Now, now, Mr. House, I'm sure violence isn't the answer. Urm, is it?"

"Hardly," said the knocker. "The question was 'What is the primary difference between Basic and Intermediate Transfiguration', and I gave him the hint 'As defined by Mrs. Hallia Dendren of Sussex, 1143, in her seminal work _Shaypshyfting and Creayting_.'"

"Which helped so very much," House added with a sneer.

Flitwick just shook his head. "The question's not very fair anyways. Ahem. The difference," he said to the Knocker, "as defined by Mrs. Dendren was that Intermediate transfiguration combines elements of creation and change, but it was proved irrelevant in 1877 when they discovered the two elements are, in fact, the same."

"Ah! Very good, professor! Either answer was acceptable." And with that, the door swung open and Flitwick, grin still plastered on his face, made his way through.

House followed, though he held back, wanting nothing to do with that smile, and proceeded only when the door threatened to shut him out yet again. When he finally made it through, squeezing through the half-shut door, he found himself in the Ravenclaw common room, looking up at the statue of the house's founder.

"You know, Mr. House, there's nothing about the knocker's riddles that even you couldn't solve with a little application." Flitwick looked up at the statue, rocking on his feet, because he knew even from limited experience that House was not going to look at him. "The rest of Ravenclaw House would be glad to help. After all, we have to work as a team, as a…" He was going to say "family" but trailed off when he remembered to whom he was speaking. "We all believe in you, the knocker is even giving you multiple guesses and I've never seen him so generous. You have great potential! But even if you're determined to pull through on your own, you'd probably be well served by studying up in the library. What you can't do without magical powers you can, after all, still learn!"

He smiled, and Rowena Ravenclaw's statue seemed to smile back down at him, and the common room, always bright and cozy, seemed so pleasant that it took him a few minutes to realise that House had walked away the moment he heard the word "help". It was possible that he left just as Flitwick said the word "help" out of sheer coincidence, though, as he had not really been listening in the first place.

House liked the Ravenclaw Common room, at least as far as it went before it filled up with children. There were the younger ones, griping and complaining about the teaching staff, the homework load and the occasional homesickness, and there were the teenagers, broken to the system but having invented their own set of problems to gripe about – relationships, mostly. House wanted none of it, but they gave him a wide berth anyways, so there were no real problems there. Except…

"Heya, Dr. House, I wondered where you went!"

House heaved a sigh as hard as he could and then continued walking, refusing to turn to face the voice behind him.

"Dr. House," it said again, and its owner ran up beside him: four and some feet of chirpy energy that House had, despite substantial efforts to the contrary, learned was named Toby. "Dr. House, I just…" it had to give a burst of speed to keep up, as House had begun to walk away. "I just heard that Sam Armstrong… In Hufflepuff… has had… a runny nose… for almost two days now! Dr. House!" It called after him, as House had headed up a set of stairs, and it paused a moment before starting to follow. "Don't you think that's just a little, tiny bit…?"

House clenched his teeth. He would have barely blinked if Sammy Armstrong had sprouted six arms that started to wrestle over who got to strangle their owner to death. It was late, he was tired, and when he slammed his dorm's door on the thing's face it stopped making sounds, which House found far closer to his personal ideal.

House liked his dorm. He liked his dorm because his dorm mates made a specific point of never being there. He was not actually even sure that they slept there, at least not since a few days after he took up residence, what with the dragging of furniture and the one-sided exchange of insults.

The last two months had been fairly good to House. No clinic duty stood out about at the top of his list. By and large he was enjoying the freedom of no work, no responsibilities, and the convenience of Wilson not being able to drive away from him if he was bored made it all worthwhile. He even had enough Vicodin stashed throughout his belongings to last him more than the year. Only in his belongings, that was, after the ones he had been hiding throughout the grounds had all but disappeared as if the school itself was trying to keep the two of them apart.

Still, there was something about Flitwick's speech, something that had been picked up at the edge of his hearing, which intrigued him. He lay for a while on his bed, Vicodin from the bottle hidden inside his old socks just starting to take effect, pondering the limited possibilities of how to spend an uninterrupted evening with himself and his own two hands, before rolling over almost to his own surprise, picking up his cane and shuffling across the room to the only suitcase his dorm mates had left within his reach. It was a simple Muggle suitcase and House had no trouble popping the lock to reveal the mess of clothing and knick knacks within. Among a handful of knuts (which he pocketed), a stick of gum (which he chewed for a while before he realized that it set off small popping explosions of light in his mouth) and clothing, House found the student's Potions book. Grabbing the sickle he found beneath it, he took the book back to his bed and began to read. After all, there was nothing better to do.

* * *

"Pass me the bandages, Mr. Wilson."

Poppy Pomfrey did not trust James Wilson with a wand. Nor did she trust him with a cauldron, nor with her medicinal herbs, nor, in the end, with her patients. It was not that he was an untrustworthy person, nor was it the strange feelings she got when she considered the life he had spent treating patients with the brutal methods of the Muggles. No, in the end, Madame Pomfrey did not trust James Wilson because he was useless.

He was trying, of course, trying as hard as he could manage to try, but in the end he was still useless. Professor Flitwick had only just begun the students' proper spell education with the traditional _Wingardium Leviosa_, and while some of the other young Wizards had set their feathers alight, worked the spell in reverse, slammed the feather through the desk and slightly into the floor, or, in one memorable case that very year, turned the feather into an airborne, feather-shaped collection of razor blades, James Wilson's feather did nothing at all. It was going to take a long time for him to get over his Squib nature, and until that day, however long away it might be, he fetched bandages.

"How's he doing today?" the man asked her as he passed the bandages and she started to re-bandage the scarred face of their patient until he was covered by them again, only patches of skin poking through.

"Oh, same as yesterday, otherwise I'd have had him out of here, wouldn't I?" she shook her head, biting her lower lip as she worked, a nasty habit she had had even when she was a student at Hogwarts. "Shallow breathing, no natural healing…"

"No consciousness," he filled in the blank. She nodded gravely.

Clayton Tanner had been unconscious for four days now, four days since Madame Pomfery had pushed her young apprentice healer out of the room as he came in. She needed the space, and Professor McGonagall needed the space to badger her Potions Master to produce a coherent sequence of events. Wilson had found himself in the hallway with Alice Stone, herself terrified to the point of silence, and it was only after the sun went down when the Headmaster bustled out of the room and shooed them back to their dorms. Wilson could tell, as he stood uselessly beside his teacher, that this was another of those situations.

"Don't you have anything to be studying, Mr. Wilson?" asked the irate healer of Hogwarts the very moment the thought occurred to him. Giving her a nod he backed out of the room, past the bench where Alice Stone, once again, sat diligently waiting for good news, and began to wander the halls before finding himself outside the Great Hall. He thought of Clayton for only a moment of the walk before his thoughts were filled with the complicated Transfiguration homework Professor Leda had assigned just that morning, and was already writing it in his head as he took his seat at the Hogwarts table.

As the time for dinner finally arrived a few minutes later, the school began to file in: students to their tables, staff to theirs, and House to make a scene of leaning over the Hufflepuff tables and saying something that actually made two of them flinch visibly from across the room. Wilson sat at the edge of the Hogwarts House table, where he had sat on his first day, close to the Slytherin table. Next to him sat Marie, the curly haired girl that had also been there on their very first day, though "next to" was subjective as Marie made a definite point of sitting as far away from him as she could manage. One the opposite side of the table, however, was a far more amiable neighbour.

"Wotcher, James," said Ian as he took his seat with his friend David. Wilson was starting to get used to people calling him 'James'. "How's the Tanner kid?"

"The same," he said over his steak.

"That's a shame. Poor kid's had such rotten luck he's just bound to wake up just in time for the exams."

Wilson held back a smile, not really wanting to encourage him. "So did you get your Astronomy homework done?"

"Yeah," said David, selecting a few items from the centre of the table. "But just barely. McBoot-Camp here wasn't gonna let me come."

Ian lowered his eyes. "Oi, now do you wanna be an auror or not?"

"We're first year!"

"So?"

David snapped a piece of celery in half. "So you don't even need Astronomy to be an auror!" He shook his head as he chewed. "And then he has me mixing up Swelling Solution. 'It's important too', he says while we're both pulling puffer fish quills out of our arms. How'm I gonna fight Dark Wizards by making their arms bloat?" He shook his head and took for a moment to his drink before looking up and saying "Evening, Dr. House."

Wilson turned to see his friend hovering behind him and Marie twisting away from both of them, like a piece of metal pushed away from two magnets at once. House lowered his eyes at David, but said nothing to him. Butting Wilson with his walking stick, House gave a jerk of his head towards the far wall. "We need to talk."

Wilson tried to make his face as innocently blank as possible. "We are talking."

"We need to talk about something important."

Wilson shrugged and turned back to his food. "So talk."

House balked. "Here? In front of the larvae?"

Wilson choked a bit and scanned the faces of his classmates as he turned back to House. Surprisingly, only Marie seemed to have caught the remark, and she responded with a look of shock. Wilson was barely sure how to respond, himself.

"Yes?"

House gestured towards the teachers table with two small pieces of paper clutched in his hand. "Your friend in the motorboard? Tell him to stop calling me 'Gregory'." He emphasized each syllable.

Wilson looked. "What, Slughorn? Tell him yourself. What am I, your mother?"

"Ah, but you're going to be seeing him tomorrow night, whereas I plan to never be in the same room as him again if I have to."

Wilson screwed up his face. "Tomorrow night? I had my last Potions class this week the other day."

House flipped one of the two pieces of paper directly into Wilson's Salisbury steak. Before the gravy soaked in, Wilson was able to make out the "Come to Celebrate—"

"That's a Slug Club invite!" Ian said, leaning over his plate. "My brother was talking about it a few days ago. He said Slughorn was raving about the invitations not coming back from the printer so he couldn't invite anyone new for the past few weeks."

"He's a little over the top, that one," David added.

"So what's the Slug Club?" Wilson asked the group.

"You'll have to tell me," House said, starting to walk away, before stopping a few steps down and pivoting. "Except don't, because I don't actually care."

"No, I knew what you meant."

"Good."

House started to walk away again when Ian got up and called after him, drawing the suspicious eye of more than a few teachers. "Dr. House! What do you think about the Tanner case?"

House stopped, dead, near the edge of the Slytherin table before turning slowly and going straight to Wilson. "You have a case? You have a _case_ and you didn't _tell_ me? Do you have any idea how _bored_ I've been?"

"Not bored enough to go to a party?"

"Well not that bored, no." House shoved his way onto the bench, pushing Wilson into Marie into the girl next to her until the entire row was upset. "Well, fill me in."

"Mr. House," Professor McGonagall said in the aggravated, tired voice she had come to use around House. "Would you please return to the Ravenclaw table?"

"Talking to my _partner_," he replied, and McGonagall shook her head and tried to ignore him. Wilson was impressed. "So c'mon," House prodded, both in voice and with a light rap of his stick. Wilson tried to concentrate on his steak.

"I didn't tell you because there's nothing you can do."

"Try me."

Wilson tried to keep focused so House couldn't see his face. "You want the symptoms?"

"Yeah."

"Okay: unconsciousness, cessation of natural healing, and catching on fire both after being doused in a magical potion containing an ashwinder egg."

"A what in a what-what?"

"Exactly."

"Hmm…"

Then the strangest thing happened. House simply stood up and walked away. Wilson watched him leave, a perplexed expression on his face.

"Did we miss something?" Ian asked between bites of his food.

Wilson shook his head to clear the fog. "I was wondering the same thing."

They all missed the look of intense concentration that had taken over House's face as he had turned away.

* * *

"Good morning, class, good morning!"

The first year History of Magic class woke with a start as the cheerful, peppy voice of Professor Sprout greeted them at the start of class instead of that of Professor Binns. They passed one another looks, confused, drowsy looks, with no idea in the least as to what could be going on. Was this right?

Wilson remembered meeting her on his first day of school. "I just couldn't turn away from Minerva and Albus' Hogwarts House idea, I suppose," she had told him as she had escorted the first years to their new, interim common room. "If you ask me, it's the most Hufflepuff-ish idea either of them have ever had, and I'd be darned if I wasn't a part of it. So I guess I'm in a slow retirement – slower than old Horace, anyways. I just tend to the first years and poke my head into the greenhouses in case Professor Longbottom needs an extra pair of hands. But this is my last year, it's been fun but it's far past time for me and the husband to settle in and grow a garden of our own. Now I remember a time when—"

"Professor," he had interrupted when he noticed the same painting go by on the wall for a second time. "Aren't we going in a circle?"

"Oh, nonsense, James, just keep following me."

He had, and the rest of the class followed him, back and forth down a hallway until, suddenly, there was a door on a wall where there hadn't been a door before. The Professor opened it into a cozy little room with two fireplaces and the Hogwarts crest woven into a soft rug on the floor. As the students hobbled in after them, Professor Sprout just smiled.

"This is an important room, Dr. Wilson, you have no idea. And perfect for dormitory duty. No one who doesn't belong here will ever be able to find it. That's what we asked it to do and that's what it'll do. And besides," she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial tone. "We thought it'd be better if we kept a firm hand on the disappearing rooms instead of letting the students have them, don't you think?"

Since Professor Sprout had made it clear she was only still at Hogwarts to babysit them as their Head of House, they were naturally surprised when same came into the room and took to the lectern at the front, along with a pile of thin, hardcover books.

Ian, having kept his surprise under control, raised an eyebrow. "What's the matter, ma'am? I hope the Professor isn't sick or something."

Sprout swatted a hand at the air in his direction. "If Professor Binns is sick with anything it's not learning new material." She waved her wand at the pile of books, which flipped themselves across the classroom to land directly on each student's desks. The book, with a cover design that looked surprisingly more modern than the rest of the textbooks Wilson had brought with him, read "Recent Wizarding History".

"We found out about four years ago that Professor Binns either cannot – or refuses to – teach anything that happened after Grogan Stump stopped being Minister for Magic almost two hundred years ago. We figured it was time to step in."

"You're sacking him?" asked David, a little too enthusiastically.

"Oh, my goodness, no." A few students groaned. "No, for the next two weeks, I'm going to be assisting Professor Binns by teaching you—" she held up the book and repeated "recent wizarding history. From the 1800s to today."

There was a sudden bustle of sound as the students began trying to out talk one another to get each of their questions to Professor Sprout. Wilson found, as he often did, that only he – and Marie, cowering in her desk almost as usual – were the only quiet ones. Somehow, it seemed, Professor Sprout pieced through them.

"Yes, yes, children, we will be learning about Lord Volde— Lord Volder—… oh, bother, I guess old habits do die hard." She collected herself. "Yes, we will be covering the rise of both Grindelwald and You-Know-Who in _due time_." There was a collective groan this time. "In the meantime, please open your textbook to its first chapter, 'A Hundred and Three Defining Events of 1807'."

Before Professor Sprout could put the finishing nail the coffin of hopes in an interesting History of Magic class, Wilson was rescued by a frantic, breathless second year boy at the door.

"I'm sorry… Professor Sprout… but Madame Pomfrey wants to see Dr. Wilson in the hospital wing immediately!"

Wilson looked to Professor Sprout, whose surprised face nodded once, and he was off, down the halls, zig-zagging through staircases towards the slowly elevating sound of an enraged voice.

"James!" she shouted the moment he entered. "Stop him immediately!"

Wilson surveyed the room. Madame Pomfrey's cheeks were puffed and red from all the shouting and not far from her was House, leaning over Clayton Tanner's unconscious body, a tongue depressor in the boy's mouth. House looked up.

"Wilson, would you shut her up? She's bothering me."

Wilson suppressed a sigh as he went to House's side to remove his arm. "It's all right, Madame Pomfrey, he's just pushing his tongue out of the way to look at his throat."

Her eyes seemed to bulge. "He has _no right_ to… stick things into my patients! He… he…" Wilson took his friend's arm and ushered him towards the door. House grinned at Madame Pomfrey and gave her a little wave. "I never want to see you in here again you savage…_thing!_"

Wilson shut the door behind him.

"Well," he said to House, "not every day you get kicked out of a hospital for being a 'savage thing'."

House blinked and looked at Wilson closely. "Are you sure you've met me?"

Wilson rolled his eyes. "Right. Anyways, didn't I warn you about—"

"The burns don't stop at his face, you know." Wilson stopped mid-sentence, surprised, and House continued. "He looks like the world's worst fire-eater in there."

"I thought you wouldn't care,"

"Are you kidding? You throw a handful of technobabble at me and expect me to just walk away from the mummy in there?"

"Would you please?" said an angry voice just slightly down the hall. There, sitting on a bench, the two doctors found Alice Stone, who looked like she had been crying.

"Ah, yes, the girlfriend," House said as he hobbled towards her.

"Excuse me?" Alice managed indignantly as she wiped her eyes.

"Oh, pardon me," House said as he came to a stop. "You know school gossip. Teenagers have such a bad habit of misinterpreting people who cry by injured people's doorstops for days at a time like a lost puppy."

"I wasn't—" she started before a sniff caught her off. "It's my faul—look, what do you want?"

"Is it possible that your totally-not-boyfriend got any of the potion into his mouth before it roasted his face like an overcooked… Wilson, do they eat turkeys here in England?"

"House…"

Alice, gathering her strength bit by bit, put on a stronger face. "Why should I tell you?"

"I'm his doctor," House replied.

Wilson coughed and turned away. "Not any more you're not."

House closed his eyes. "Madame Pomfrey and I are having a disagreement on procedure."

"Actually, I don't think you were ever his—"

House wedged himself onto the bench beside Alice between words. "Are you one of those wizards that freak out when I tell them I've reached inside of a human body before and cut into the intestines and fun stuff like that?" He smiled broadly. "Because that's never going to get old."

Alice pulled back a bit. "No… My parents are Muggles, I have a doctor back home."

"Oh." House looked disappointed but then suddenly, so fast it was disarming for Wilson as well as Alice, snapped back to crude, sharp and strictly demanding, hand gesturing towards her face: "Did he get any of the potion in his mouth?"

Alice's eyes went panicked and her hands went to her temple. "I don't know! I don't know, it was all so sudden and then he was on the ground with his hands on his face and maybe…" she caught her breath. "Maybe one of his hands was on his mouth."

House took to his feet and walked away at as fast a pace as he could manage, and Wilson looked back and forth between the distraught girl and the purposeful cripple before following the latter.

"What was _that_ all about?" he asked as he caught up.

"Your voodoo priestess says the mummy-man should be on his feet by now, right?"

"Madame Pomfrey isn't a voodoo—"

"So I say he's still unconscious because he drank some kind of magic potion."

Wilson stopped suddenly at the force of House saying something sensible for the first time in months – since long before the Hogwarts adventure had begun. What if something in Clayton's potion had put him to sleep? It certainly did not seem like the behaviour of a love potion but maybe… House was walking away fast.

"Where are you going?" he called after him. House turned.

"This is a school, isn't it?" House pursed his lips and looked around innocently as if to make sure. "I'm going to study!" And then he turned a corner and was gone.

* * *

If he hadn't have been living at Hogwarts for the past few months, House would have been impressed by Professor Slughorn's party arrangements, but meal after meal served across five exquisite banquet tables left any other arrangement of food paling in comparison. Still, Slughorn had tried his best, and there was a large table layered with food on multi-tired silver platters and an elaborate fountain centerpiece that spouted a red juice. Juice. Not wine, House ruminated. He could dream, but he knew better than that. Across the wall behind the table was a banner that read "HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANISHA". More curious, however, was the spread itself: a set of dishes almost entirely taken from Indian cuisine. House, having long missed the strip of restaurants and pubs not far from Plainsboro, had a plate full of tandoori chicken in his hand and a jaebi in his mouth before anyone seemed to notice him at all.

"Doctor House!" came Slughorn's voice from the back. House had attended a grand total of one class with the old man and had met outside only the one time, but it was a voice you did not forget. "So good you could make it! We've already lost Miss Stone, it wouldn't help to lose another, would it?" House, still with his back turned to the other, raised an eyebrow. From Wilson's description of him, House had expected Slughorn to ignore him as a talentless Muggle, but he wondered if the "expert diagnostician" thing had gotten out.

"I see you're enjoying some of our food. Excellent! The Slug Club has been spending the past few birthdays this year enjoying bits of our heritage through food and song!" House, for the first time, realised that a highly traditional Indian tune was ambient in the room, as if without source. His eyes instinctively scanned the room to find a speaker. "I hope you or Dr. Wilson would be so kind as to join us on one of your birthdays so we can share in a little of the American experience!"

House's wandering eyes settled on Anisha Waldron, whom he knew through the ramblings of his tail-like talking appendage (Toby) to be Hogwarts' newest Quidditch prodigy and Gryffindor team captain, responsible for their 175-45 victory over Slytherin in the season opener. While she was visibly of Indian descent – House felt fairly confident he could guess what region her family had once lived but that would just be showing off – House managed to catch her look of disbelief in Slughorn's direction and mild confusion towards her plate, shaking her head and muttering "My parents are from Surrey! I don't even know what these are!" Slughorn neither seemed to notice or care, more intent on having a good, if irrationally themed, party, and House was perfectly content to join in. More food for him, after all.

The professor had returned to whatever he had been saying when House had entered the room. House recognized a few of the people around him from a few of his Ravenclaw/Slytherin doubles classes: Sasha Dashkov, whose parents worked for the Department of Sports and Games after lengthy and highly decorated careers in international Quidditch. Joshua Kiryu, the first member of his family to leave Honshu (on the back of a huge wad of cash from his father, an executive for Mitsubishi, who was absolutely determined to get him into "the best wizarding school in the world"). Then there was Nathaniel Marsh, a spirited nobody with enough talent and business acumen that everyone knew he would one day transform his personal savings of three galleons, four knuts into a fortune to rival that of his two classmates. Obviously, Slughorn had taken a liking to them. House had too. House liked all the Slytherins.

"I think it was Christmas '72," the old professor was saying. "During Dumbledore's fanged mistletoe phase, of course. That was when the late Headmaster would line the halls with mistletoe plants that would pursue any couple that refused to share a kiss under them. It's a long story, but in the end Minerva managed to talk him out of it. That was the day I knew he would grow to be someone of great importance. True Minister of Magic material, that boy, and I knew it the moment he grabbed one of the wretched things out of mid air in his fist. In fact, I think that little incident highlights Minister Shacklebolt's political style as much as it does his tenure as an auror. Naturally, he would have never had made it to the auror's department without my help on his potions work, and while he's never exactly said thank you, I'm certain that—"

House had gritted through most of the speech because his mouth was full, but after he had had a bite or two of each item he realised just how little more he could take of this. He cut immediately to the chase:

"How can an embryonic ashwinder survive being immersed in a liquid solution consisting partially of absorbent?"

More than a few students looked up at him, Wilson among them, though House was certain at least two of them slunk further into sleep. Slughorn stopped dead mid-sentence.

"P-pardon?"

House grinned inwardly at the social spotlight he had just seized. "The burns on Clayton Tanner's face were caused by a fertilized ashwinder egg."

Wilson's face was a look of surprise but House could tell he was slowly losing the other students. Slughorn's face fell. "Yes, as far as I can tell. They only live an hour, it's not like they're built to lay eggs unfertilized."

"But burns don't explain the unconsciousness," House jibbed back, "which is why I've been spending the past few hours researching potions. Now, again, how does an embryonic ashwinder survive a solution consisting partially of magical absorbent?"

Wilson tried to shake away his confused stupor. "House, what are you talking about?"

House rolled his eyes. "Wilson… if you put something that's _alive… _into liquid… it drowns. You're not much of a doctor, are you?" Some of the students who were still looking gave him a half-shocked look and he groaned aloud. "Oh come on you pansies. When you use animal parts in a potion, they usually have to die first. That's what happens when someone plucks off your tail and puts it in their Sleeping Draught."

Slughorn's eyes were locked on House in a peculiar way, the edges of his mouth twitching, slowly, upwards. "Ah-ah, but an ashwinder—"

House held out a hand to silence him. "An ashwinder can't die of anything but old age and birth pains unless its fire is quenched, which—which!!" His hand snapped up again as Slughorn moved to interrupt him. "Which does _not_ apply to a potion solution as a love potion is a 'Hot' solution according to Wu Xing-Greco combined potion theory, so its ingredients are designed to foster instead of douse heat and flames." Wilson's head hurt, and he rubbed at his temple as Slughorn moved again. "BUT! But, the absorbent I mentioned – when I started talking – would drain away the magic of the fire into the potion, killing the ashwinder unless the fire was unbelievably strong, which doesn't seem likely for a baby."

"House…" Wilson was sure he was getting a migraine from all this. "House, what does any of this…"

But Slughorn was on his feet, beaming like a kid on Christmas morning. "Excellent, Dr. House! Excellent! I say, who gave you the recipe for the potion we were making in class that day?"

House scratched at the back of his head. "No one did. I had to use Kleiner's formulas to reverse engineer most of it. Seemed faster than checking all seventeen Love Potions in _Magical Drafts and Potions._"

Slughorn's jaw slowly fell agape as Wilson's face screwed up and he mouthed "What?" to House, whose grin grew even larger. "Kleiner's formulas!" spouted the Potions Master, slapping House hard on the shoulder. "I waste half of the fifth year getting students to remember the formulas in time for the OWLs and I'm lucky if one of them even starts to comprehend them in time for sixth year." House looked disappointedly at the hand on his shoulder and said nothing. "Ah! Come, come!" Slughorn gestured the two of them to his desk and the party, such as it was, revived around their bubble as Slughorn began to talk over his food.

"You're very right, Doctors. The ashwinder that attacked Mr. Tanner should have died after it was put in the solution, but I'm afraid you may have over-researched the subject. I'm afraid most of Kleiner's fomulas don't apply to this situation. Here." He took a scrap of well-worn but quality parchment from his desk and handed it to House.

"'Potion Base'?" House read aloud, and Wilson leaned over his shoulder.

"Oh, right. You taught us this just last week, didn't you sir?"

Slughorn nodded. "You see, Dr. Wilson, Kleiner and Lurich's formulas are cornerstones of Potioncraft. They're the keys to understanding how to balance the ingredients of even the simplest potions. But like I said, even a fifth year student can't seem to choke down why we would have to change the Sprite Powder in a Pepperup Potion to Beetle Eggs just because they want to use Green Peppers instead of Red!" House scoffed and Slughorn chuckled, and Wilson just watched them with a raised eyebrow and a look of disbelief. "So you see my dilemma. Instead of trying to change the impossible, I – and my compatriots in all the magical schools I know of – use Potion Base until the students reach NEWT level and have to start creating their own recipes."

House returned to the paper and nodded. "This would cover most A to R level potions." He tossed it onto the desk. "But they'd have the shelf life of a… well, an ashwinder."

Slughorn grunted. "Normally I can grade a class worth of potions in under an hour of prep time, but…" He reached behind him to a shelf built into the wall, and withdrew a vial filled with a semi-solid green sludge that seemed to be growing boils, each topped with a small tuft of blond hair. "Mr. Nasen," he said with a cough as he dropped the thing to the table, "submitted his assignment more than a little late."

Wilson pulled back from the vial, covering his nose as the whole thing smelled like rotten meat, but House leaned forward, looked at it from a few perspectives, and then asked "Wit-Sharpening Solution?"

"Ironically enough."

House nodded. He seemed almost completely satisfied with what he had found and took what time was left in the conversation to tie up one last loose end. "Then just to count it out: there's no way anyone could have poisoned the potion deliberately?"

Slughorn shook his head. "Certainly not, you learn to keep a close eye on what goes into the vials when a class full of students is armed with potential explosives. Even when my back is turned I'm perfectly aware of what goes on in my classroom."

Wilson raised an eyebrow at that, but there was a satisfied pause between the two of the other two, which was broken when House abruptly stood up, took the Potion Base ingredients list, and started to leave.

"What?" Wilson was the one who spoke first. "House, where are you going?"

He held up the list. "I got what I wanted."

Slughorn, who had stood up just as Wilson spoke, sat down to his chair with a satisfied "Ah yes…" House saluted him a bit too enthusiastically with the paper and left.

"Still confused, Mr. Wilson?" Slughorn asked, and gestured to him to sit down, which he did only slowly and reluctantly.

"It's a simple second year concept, Dr. Wilson," he began. "Until a potion meets a certain, balanced level of ingredients, each with their own traits like 'absorbents' and 'preservatives' and…" seeing he was losing his audience, Slughorn shifted gears.

"I won't expect you to understand the details. The point is, until the proper balance is reached, a potion is just… a bunch of things floating in water! No magical properties at all. But if you add the right things – or the wrong things – it suddenly becomes a quite magical bunch of things floating in water. They keep their old properties – honey is still sweet, and so on, but they gain new ones, like the power to levitate whoever drinks it, or so forth. Sometimes the power doesn't come in the ways you expected. Like when your friend David's Strengthening Solution became lighter than air and floated out the window."

Wilson nodded once, then twice, slower, as it started to come to him. "So House thinks that Clayton added something to the potion base that made a… _different_ potion? One that knocked him out?"

Slughorn nodded again and Wilson gritted his teeth, scowling.

"What's the matter?" the potions master asked.

"It's just House. House having to be… arrgh, having to be House!"

* * *

House paced about the Ravenclaw common room (the password was "What combination of tallow and sweetgrass produces a growth solution that is still considered appetising?" almost threw him until he realised it was another in a line of trick questions and that there was only one combination of tallow and sweetgrass that produced a growth solution at all. He wondered how on earth he had had trouble with these things before.). His face was constantly in a book – potions books, bestiaries, spellbooks – none of them his. While he normally simply stole the books from his studying classmates, he did, at least once, read over the shoulder of a fellow student who happened to be on the right page at the right time, until he out-read her and started turning pages. Toby followed in his wake, but kept a safe distance.

Finally, after four hours in which he seemed to gain more than a few wrinkles and had popped at least seven vicodin, he stamped his good foot on the floor and shouted at Rowena Ravenclaw. "What the hell kind of love potion knocks people out?" He set his teeth into a grimace. "What did it turn into?"

There was a deafening pause in the room, but he kept his death stare on the statue. Then, in a small, half-hearted voice, someone said "Sleeping Draught?"

House's eyes moved first, then the eyebrows, then the head, before he gave a sharp jolt of a turn and shook his cane arm dismissively. "You couldn't strengthen that recipe enough if you milked every Doxy from here to New York."

Another pause. "Petrification Dram?" suggested Toby, who had heard about it in Defence Against the Dark Arts. "It would keep him still, at least…"

"Oh, right, I forgot to check his skin to make sure it hadn't turned into granite. Very helpful."

"What about the Draught of Living Death?" said another.

"Oh please. You don't know what that does!"

"What about a Calming Draught, or the Draught of Peace?"

House stopped, then crossed the room to a group of fifth year girls. One of them, a girl a hand shorter than the others, spoke again.

"You're trying to figure out what happened to Clayton Tanner, aren't you?"

"What about them?" he said, pointing at her potions book.

"Well you were talking about strengthening a sleeping potion, and I thought that if everyone's looking for sleeping potions, wouldn't strengthening something sort of… _like_ a sleeping potion it work too? So I thought about relaxing potions and…"

House snatched the fifth year Potions book from the girl next to him – earlier in the night he had taken one from one of her friends but had discarded it haphazardly into the middle of a group of second years – and began to skim the pages. To the girl's disappointment, he shook his head. "Calming Draught's stabilising ingredients would mess with the Potion Base/ashwinder mix and turn it into a… magical Superball." He turned a few more pages, and then settled on another page. He read for quite a while, eyes lowering. "There might be something to the Draught of Peace, though…" He looked up at her. "What does an ashwinder produce to power its fires? If it's an activator or maybe an enhancer for sleep medicines we might have something to go on."

She gave him the same befuddled look as Wilson had hours ago and his patience evaporated. Turning around, he found Toby and snapped his fingers at him. The boy looked confused and House prompted "Ashwinders!" Still confused. "Fourth year!"

Toby looked around, first out of panic and then… he snatched a fourth year Care of Magical Creatures textbook from a surprised classmate. The book lunged at him and there was quite a bit of a scene as the fifth-year girl had to rescue him from the wild tome before it did any permanent damage. House sighed.

"Forget it!" he said once Toby was back on his feet. "I've already read that thing's section on Ashwinders three times. Go to the professor and ask him." The three of them (the students and the book) stared at him like animals stuck in a headlight.

"N…now?"

"Yes now! What, is there a problem?"

Toby couldn't help but look around at the common room full of students staring at them. "I-it's almost midnight! It's against the rules!"

House scoffed. "Please. You, how old are you? What, sixteen?"

The girl blinked. "Fifteen."

"Good for you. Now come on, you can't expect me to believe you've never snuck out to meet some Gryffindor boyfriend or…" he looked around, as if remembering where he was, "…to visit the library or whatever it is you people do." She looked a little red in the cheeks but said nothing.

"Look," House said, draping his arm over their shoulders and slowly motioning them out of the room. "You do this and you'll be helping out a very sick person, and maybe if you're quick, I'll make you something as a thank you."

"Really?" Toby asked, perhaps a little too surprised.

"No!" House said with a gleeful, overacted smile, before shutting the door and leaving them outside in the hall.

* * *

_Don't stop there! The rest of the chapter has already been uploaded and is just ahead!_

_By the way, that Fanged Mistletoe thing? It's obviously a reference to The Shoebox Project (which is a fairly popular HP fanfic, if you've never heard of it), and I figured I'd point that out here instead of in my author's notes at the end!_


	3. A Stopper in Death Part 2

"Oh, I don't believe this," Hagrid said as he hustled the two of them into his cabin. "I mean, what kind of _nerve…_"

"I know he's breaking a lot of rules, Professor Hagrid, but I think he's honestly trying to help!"

The girl rolled her eyes. "You would."

"Well I dunno, Hailley, at least I believe why he's here." Hagrid sat them down at his table and moved to his fire to prepare hot water for tea. His eyes were droopy and Fang slept silently in the corner he had chosen after Hagrid had pushed him away from the door. It had clearly been an early night for both of them. Hagrid sat himself down and turned back to his long-time Care of Magical Creatures student. "What's your excuse, then?"

She shrugged. "I dunno, I guess he just… seems like he knows what he's doing?"

Hagrid scoffed. "So did Volde—" he realised what he was saying and coughed loudly. "Lucius Malfoy. So did Lucius Malfoy."

"Who?"

"Nothing. Look, what does this 'Doctor' House want so badly he's willing to send you out in the middle of the night for it?"

"He wants to know what an Ashwinder produces to fuel its fires," Toby quoted from memory.

"He what?" Hagrid grunted and turned his head towards the castle as if to stare House out of it. "Still thinking like a Muggle. Ashwinders fuel their fire with magic, a' course! Just like most magical creatures. That's why they're called that, after all! They've all got something to do with magic!"

Tipping his head slightly forward, something caught his eye and he stood up. "You all wouldn't happen to want some curry chicken, would you? I can heat it up if you want." Seeing their expressions he explained. "Haven't touched the stuff. Slughorn keeps feeding us leftovers after his parties whether we want them or not." He rolled his eyes. "It's not that I don't like the curry, normally anyways, but Slughorn picks some bad cooks. Trust the House Elves, I say. Everything he's given me's been a huge waste. I usually just throw it out."

Hailley accepted the plate from her teacher if only to get the conversation back on track.

"Dr. House was pretty insistent. He thinks something about the Ashwinder or its fuel mixed with the potion it was in and that had something to do with why Clayton Tanner's been unconscious for days."

"Oh is that what this is all about. Well then, maybe I can answer that." Hagrid scratched at the bridge of his nose, settling in to his chair. "Well you see, you two, ashwinders only live about an hour, and they're unbelievably dangerous from there to there. You'll learn to respect something when it jumps out from under your cooking pot and half burns your house down," he added with a wink. Neither of them even smiled, so he grumbled a bit to cover and carried on.

"Anyways, I don't normally keep any ashwinders around for exactly that reason, but when the Potions master calls me up to order a few from the Minstry – the only place you can get them, legit-wise, that is – and I build up a big bonfire for the eggs. The bigger the bonfire, the stronger the ashwinders!" The students looked at one another: Hagrid sounded so certain he couldn't be wrong but there was something frightening about a giant fire giving birth to smaller, moving fires.

"I let the fire burn for five days. The ashwinders come out, lay their eggs and die. Everything they've got in 'em goes into the eggs. That's why they die, after all. I take some of the eggs for the first class, let the rest hatch the next day for the next class, third day goes to Professor Slughorn's stores, and then I sell the rest. I've got a budget to look after, after all!" he defended, seeing Hailley's suspicious look.

"The point of all of this is: if there's anything in the ashwinder that knocked Clayton out, it has to do with what they ate. Everything goes into the eggs, like I said, so that can only mean what they ate."

"Well what do they eat?" Toby asked.

"Don't have time to eat. Only an hour to live and all."

"But you just said—"

"They don't have time to eat, at least not like the rest of us, but they _do_ eat. They sort a'… absorb the fire, and what's in the fire changes them. You need a magical ingredient, for starters. Most people get ashwinders in their house thanks to the floo port but I use this stuff."

He crossed the room as he spoke, reaching into a box he had been using to hold garbage and pulled out a container marked _Fabrcant Brand Wart Removing Powder!_ He tossed it into Toby's lap, who squirmed away from it so that it fell on the floor, tipping to its side but fortunately empty. Hagrid kept talking as if nothing had happened.

"That stuff seems to get me a few more ashwinders than floo, you see, can't imagine why, but the wood's just as important to how the ashwinders turn out. That's why I use fresh walnut from the forest. I've been doing this for decades and trust me, ashwinders hatched in walnut lay more eggs. Oak's the worst, which is strange because the oak ashwinders are always so much bigger than the others. Even the birch ashwinders have more eggs than oak and they spend their first hour half asleep if you can believe it. Now juniper—"

"That's okay, Professor," Hailley interrupted. "Now are you certain you used walnut wood for the ashwinder's fire the night Clayton's egg was laid?"

Hagrid's look of concentration was broken by the whistle of the kettle. "Well I think so," he said as he poured the water for tea – only half full, since he was about to get them back to Ravenclaw Tower as soon as possible. "I mean, I've been doing this forever but maybe I got one or two of the wrong branches."

Hailley sighed into her cup. "So we're going to have to check every tree that grows in the forest."

"Now don't you go saying that," Hagrid said with a pat on her back. "You can't let this doctor go bossing the both of you around. He has to do some of his own lifting. Besides," he said, lowering his head between the two of them and giving a wink. "If our Professor Longbottom doesn't know what tree did this, I'll eat everything Slughorn puts on my plate for a year."

* * *

Wilson tried to keep the fact that House was good at Potions from bothering him, but it was hard when he spent all his time in classes and couldn't even manage to shoot sparks from his wand with any consistency, while House only showed up for some of his classes, most of them by accident, and was Slughorn's new darling. Herbology was about the only place Wilson could stand to see him, since it was probably the most Muggle-esque of the truly magical core subjects. He felt like House's equal there while still being above zero. Neither of them could handle any of the larger plants, of course, and at least two of them had tried to eat Wilson already, but with some of the smaller plants they could both manage. Potions came close to being a Muggle subject, but even the simplest sprinkle of Freshening Water needed a charm for the final step, and so even House was left out in the cold, but Herbology was something else. After all, gardening was still gardening, and sometimes the only difference between the two was whether you used cow or dragon fertilizer, or if you kept a stainless steel or an enchanted silver trowel close at hand. But when House came into the greenhouse, flanked by a rattled-looking second year boy and a confused looking fifth-year girl, Wilson got suspicious all over again, especially when they were butting into the Hogwarts House Herbology period.

"Good morning, class, good morning Marie," Professor Longbottom said as he ducked into the classroom, butting past several of the first years including the mousy girl, who backed swiftly into a corner at being addressed directly. His voice was muffled behind a large earthenware pot from which sprouted the most twisted, oversized plant Wilson had ever seen.

"Today," he announced with a mix of a speech's tone and the relief of setting the giant plant on the table in the centre of the room, "we'll be pruning this Möbius Vine. Now be careful!" he cautioned as the entire class reached at once for their pruning shears. "We're not going to start cutting until I show you what to look for. A lot of the time what looks like a growth is actually another part of the vine twisting back on itself. Once we're done, we'll be planning the larger growths in new pots or put them aside for grafting next class. See how many of them we can get, all right?" He clapped his gloved hands together, sending a puff of dirt into the air. He looked over his class, who looked back at him, still apprehensive after what the Trollish Sundew had tried to do when they pruned the wrong part of _it_.

"Oh! Doctor House. What can I do for you and your…" He started to say 'friends', and Wilson thought it was to his stubborn credit that he was the only one left in the school that would even have thought of saying it. "Is this about Clayton Tanner?" he asked instead. Clearly word was getting around.

House seemed to find this directness agreeable. "What types of wood are associated with sleeping potions?"

"What about the wart powder?" interjected the girl.

The boy spoke up. "If Dr. House doesn't think it's the wart powder, it's not the wart powder!"

They began to argue back and forth as the class watched. Wilson noticed House close his eyes tight, clench a fist and began to mouth "One… two… thre—" before half sighing, half growling and talking over them.

"It's not the wart powder because the gamekeeper's been using it for years and you don't see unconscious fourth years stacked up like firewood at Madame Pomfrey's door every fall." He sighed again but paused, raised an eye at Professor Longbottom and asked: "You don't, do you?"

"Professor Snape wouldn't let me make a love potion because he said it would be the worst thing to ever happen to Hogwarts," the Professor said with a grin. "Once I made a Cheer—"

House held up a hand. "Wood. Sleeping Potions."

"I tell you how horrible I am at Potions and you keep asking me about them?"

Wilson laughed and House gave him a levelling stare. He coughed and recovered.

"A Herbology professor that doesn't know what his plants do is like a sex ed teacher that think babies happen when a mommy and daddy love each other very much." He paused, cocking his head as if sniffing the air. "You do have sex ed in this school, don't you?"

Professor Longbottom, surrounded by eleven year olds, coughed loudly while Wilson and the Ravenclaw fifth year girl looked out longingly through the greenhouse walls.

House repeated himself. "Wood. Sleeping. Potions."

Longbottom shook his head, reaching an arm up to touch and caress the Mobius vine, which trembled slightly and then curled and coiled itself in a way Wilson could only describe as contented. "You're barking up the wrong tree, Dr. House, so to speak. Wood's a great conductor and storage for magic…" he whipped out his wand, spinning it dextrously like a seasoned wand dueller. "But it doesn't have any magical properties of its own."

The two Ravenclaws looked downtrodden; House, as Wilson expected, looked slightly to the side, thinking quickly. It was the boy who spoke first.

"What about leaves?"

Longbottom nodded. "You might have something with leaves…"

House shook his head. "Magical leaves are almost always a dampener in potions, it would have cancelled out the heat of the ashwinder and it never would have melted through the glass."

"Insects?" suggested the girl.

Wilson was surprised to be the one to answer. "No, I haven't seen a single insect product that hasn't been dried and grounded before it goes into a Potion. Eggs, insects themselves…" He felt a little self conscious with everyone watching him talk about grinding up dead insects, especially when he was not entirely sure what he was talking about. "I mean, there must be a reason that always happens, and unless one of them was dried out by the smoke before it was burned…"

He was disappointed to see House shake his head. "No, you can use wet animal ingredients." A heavy pause. "…But not incinerated animal ingredients. That's Lurich's second law of animal magic. 'The organ must be intact to…'" and then he spun his finger in the air as if to say "and so on, and so on," even though he was clearly the only one who knew what he was talking about. "Unless you have something mixed in there that was already prepared by the animal, like a venom, wax or honey."

Longbottom shrugged and patted the Möbius vine again. "I'm not sure, Dr. House. Maybe you could try the vine here? They say trying to follow the vine brings enlightenment."

Wilson tried it, following the path of the vine from the soil upwards, rightwards, leftwards and in other directions he wasn't sure had been named yet. Occasionally it coiled, or thick growths – potential new Möbius vines – would branch off of it. Sometimes the vine would twist around and pass right through an older and thicker section, sometimes with no marks at all. But if the solution to Clayton Tanner's illness was up there, it eluded him and the Ravenclaw students.

House had left long before.

* * *

There are a few places in Hogwarts where a mark of magic so intense, thorough or powerful has stayed constant over decades, centuries and may possibly continue to do so for the rest of the school's history. Considering the considerable weave of spells put in place by the school's founders, all four of them knowing full well the damage a young wizard, trained and untrained, was capable of doing (for completely different reasons), it is in many ways remarkable that any spells stay active in Hogwarts at all. Lord Voldemort's curse on the Defence Against the Dark Arts job flowed through the halls of the school through its sheer power. In a cordoned section of the fifth floor, a magical swamp can be found that is tied so well together that it has stayed firmly intact for years in much the condition in which it was made, even without drainage or rainfall. And to serve as an example of intense magic, magic created through sheer demand of the user, there is Hogwart's library. Hogwarts has not had need of a librarian for almost ten years, as when its last librarian, Miss Irma Pince, left the school one year, she left behind her a series of charms so firmly intended that the library has since done a stupendous job of policing itself.

Books – old books, the kind no one wanted to read anyways – patrolled the aisles, aggressively ramming into people who talked too loud, snapping shut loudly near students that had fallen asleep, and enforcing harsher violations by ganging up and punishing en masse. A particular pair had gained the harshest repute: a copy of _Defensive Magical Theory, _which hunted down rule-breakers and non ruler-breakers alike, alerting its partner, a copy of _The Big Banshee Book of Songs_, an unrestricted book that screamed louder than anything else in the library, to arrive and enforce the former's idea of laws by simply opening itself in the vicinity of the guilty.

To offset for the pair's antics, the restricted section remained firmly locked – as most of the students were now deaf to screaming books as was. They remained so until a note was handed to the eye-shaped tangle of wrought iron that centred each gate into the section. The gate would read the note and, if passed a forgery, would rattle back and forth, shaking the shelves it was attached to until the books fell down and taught the students what restricted books really sounded like. Last of all was the vortex – a gathering of invisible magical energy that collected dropped off books and nicked books being taken from the library that hadn't been signed out in the giant book that never ran out of pages. It also took it upon itself to steal food and drinks that were attempting to enter the library, and it did not stop there, as House found one day when it started to tug at the vicodin he kept stitched into his coat pocket. He only kept a hold on it by walking furiously in the opposite direction.

In the weeks that had followed, though, House had made a sort of stalemate with the library by, essentially, tattling on his fellow students. He got peace and quiet and the books got to chase out pretty much any student that came within his hearing range. He sat at his usual table, Potions book to his right, Care of Magical Creatures book to his left and two containers of wart powder, one empty, before him.

That was how Wilson found him that one evening, staring off into the opposite shelf (_Do-Gooders of the Magical World_ through _Dreadful Stenches of Lemuria_, all by the prolific Lighton family of researchers) like a man in a trance. He sat down directly opposite of him, and, not getting any immediate response, picked up the empty container of wart powder and looked inside.

"Getting so used to Wizards you're starting to catch their diseases?" he asked sarcastically.

House slowly slipped out of his doze and seemed to notice Wilson for the first time. Sleepily, he reached out, put his hand into the full container of wart powder and brushed his hand against Wilson's cheek.

"Uh… House?"

Without a word, House then reached into the empty container of wart powder and scraped the edges, coming out with a small collection of powder on his fingertips. Reaching out, he brushed that hand against Wilson's other cheek, which promptly started to turn red, not so much out of embarrassment but as the grains started to burn with an inner flame. He jumped, swatting at his face until the grains were all pushed aside, and glowered at his friend.

"This," House said, turning the full bottle towards him, "is an old sample from a few months ago I found in the hospital wing."

"But you're not allowed in the hospital—"

"_This_," House turned the empty one aside, "is new, with the exact same label but a new formula that gives it a 'warm, soothing feeling', according to their ad in the _Prophet_." He slid a piece of the newspaper out from under his Potions book.

"Warm and soothing? That thing practically burned my skin… wait."

House gave a half-grin, half-sneer.

"So you're saying whatever they put into this powder to make it 'warm and soothing' is what helped the ashwinder egg get so hot it melted through the glass?"

House nodded unenthusiastically. "As soon as the freezing charm was gone, yes."

Wilson was so excited but so constrained by the library's self-enforced rules of silence that he just had to stand up. "That means the reason the ashwinder got on Clayton's face in the first place was because this company didn't change their label! There must be some kind of law they broke there. This is great!"

"No it's not."

"But why—"

"Because it's not the right _symptom_!" House slammed his fist down onto the table. Instantly a book hover-snapped into view at the end of the aisle. Seeing the look it was giving them, Wilson collected the containers of powder and guided House out of the library.

"The egg melting itself isn't my problem. I don't care if Adolf Hitler jumped through time and hit the kid with a flamethrower. I only care why he's unconscious."

"You're so considerate to your patients and the millions of World War Two era dead."

They were walking down the halls, Wilson leading as House occasionally stopped and complained to no one in particular.

"This is like being back in med school," he said when they happened to pass the wall where the Hogwarts House door would have appeared if Wilson had wanted it to. "I've almost _got it_, I'm almost _there_, but I'm missing something I haven't even learned, something I would know if I knew more, but I _don't…_"

Wilson tried not to catch his eye. "I've never seen you this helpless before."

"I'm not helpless, I just need to read more. Something got into that ashwinder that got into the potion that's keeping this kid unconscious. Just a little bit more."

"Ah."

Wilson had led House to the hospital wing and sat him down at the small desk Madame Pomfrey had given him. He made him a cup of tea from the self-heating teapot he had bought before the year began and waited while House's complaints were blocked by the teacup.

He sighed. "Here, House." He tossed over Clayton's medical notes and House began to attack them eagerly. "You seem involved enough, maybe there's something that—" But House had already looked up, across the room, one of his looks on his face. "Wait, you can't possibly have read enough to…"

"What have you been feeding him?" House asked, his eyes on the still unconscious Tanner.

"What do you mean?"

"This chart says he's supposed to be scrawny… 106. But he looks like you've been gorging him."

Wilson looked, and immediately saw what House was talking about. Clayton looked like he had gained a frightening amount of weight, especially in his stomach. Wilson wondered how he had missed it, but realised that he had seen the boy every day, and had not noticed the slow growth, while House had only seen him the one time, days before.

Just then, as House was moving towards the patient to get a closer look, Poppy Pomfrey came into the room, livid.

"Mr. House! What on Earth are you doing in here again? I have half a mind to—"

"Did you know your patient has gained at least thirty pounds in the past week?" House asked as if it was little more than a piece of trivia. Madame Pomfrey stopped in her tracks.

"What?"

House's eyes traced a path across the room and came to rest on the medical notes he had left on the table. He walked over to them, collected a quill and tape from the table and stuck the first page of notes backwards onto the wall. Taking the pen, he scribbled in his large handwriting the words "BURNS", "COMA", "NO HEALING" and "RAPID WEIGHT GAIN".

"Wilson," he said in a commanding tone. "Get me my team."

"Your what?"

"You know, the black girl and the annoying kid."

Wilson paused, his face reflecting his confusion as it so often had as of late. "How am I supposed to get into your common room?"

"Pfft," House gave his head an exaggerated roll. "The lock is a game of trivial pursuit. I'm honestly surprised there aren't more break-ins."

Wilson took a step back. "I'll… get Professor Sprout."

When he returned almost an hour later spent waking people and letting them dress, he returned to find House unmoved, still staring at his list of symptoms as a tired looking Madame Pomfrey sat at her desk. House cast a look over his shoulder.

"I said bring _my_ team."

"They… followed me," he said.

Truth be told, Professor Sprout was already up, talking to an overstressed-looking Marie. Like a child unwilling to separate from her mother, Marie had dragged herself after the Professor, and had raised such a ruckus that Ian had woken as well and came after them.

"What's this all about then, Dr. House?" asked Professor Sprout, looking about as kind as she could manage in what had become the middle of the night.

"We have… a new symptom." He pointed to the board. "Mull it over, will you? Wilson." He grabbed Wilson's shoulder and pulled towards the exit.

"What's the deal, House?" he asked as he found himself in the hallway.

"Need a clear room. Clear room, clear heads."

"Oh please, House, you want to—"

"'Ello, gents," called a voice slightly down the hall, on the bench. "You here to question me again?"

Even at this hour, Alice Stone was on the bench, waiting, her eyes bloodshot and a half-empty bottle of firewhisky in her hand. Wilson's heart sank a little.

"Alice," he said, shaking his head and taking a seat in the bench beside her. "I keep telling you this isn't your fault." She gave him a completely neutral look in response. "How did you get that?" he asked, reaching for the firewhisky. She looked at his outstretched hand sadly, as House took a seat beside Wilson, and she handed it over.

"It wasn't easy," she replied. "But you can do it if you really want to."

House reached over for the whisky, and Wilson handed it to him absently as he spoke. "For goodness' sake, Alice, you're fourteen."

She wiggled her fingers in the air and mouth "Ooo." Wilson tried to ignore her.

"Stuff like this isn't going to help you get over what happened."

"Really?" she said. She could see House taking a good long look at the whisky label. He looked impressed. "'Cause I think it's working. That's firewhisky for you. It starts working real fast."

"But you're falling so behind on your studies that you're practically going to have to take the year over again." Wilson shook his head as House downed a gulp from the bottle and handed it back to Alice. She saluted him passed Wilson's irritated glare and took another drink of her own.

"This is more important than my studying, Dr. Wilson. I can't go through the rest of my life knowing I almost killed somebody!" She passed the bottle back to House. "I mean what would you do?"

Wilson tried to snatch the bottle back from House, who dodged him. "In my line of work? Sometimes you go on to the next patient and see when they're going to die."

The girl's face fell. "Sorry."

House passed the bottle back to Alice, though his hand was wobbly as he did so. "This is strong stuff!" he appraised, his voice tilted by the slightest slur. He looked at his hand, which swung slightly back and forth as if he could not hold it still. "How much of this have you had?"

Alice shrugged and tipped the now almost empty bottle back towards her lips before passing it back once again.

"Look, Alice, all I'm saying is, if you let this keep growing, if you let it take over your life, you won't… won't… House, I think you've had enough."

House had taken to his feet, upper body wobbling against his cane, arm against the wall. He looked baffled, and kept looking at the bottle he had left in his seat, from which he had only taken three mouthfuls.

"I'm all right," he said, lifting his hand off the wall as if to show so, and his walking stick slipped on the ground beneath him. He fell to the ground and his stick fell through the air, striking Alice hard across her legs. She flinched only slightly and picked up the stick as it clattered to the ground, joining Wilson as he helped House to his feet.

"C'mon House," Wilson was saying. "You're not in your twenties any more, school's not a time to drink yourself to the floor."

But House was not listening to him. Instead, he stared at his cane as Alice handed it to him, watched it as he set it back to the floor and regained a wobbly balance. His eyebrows slowly rose, and his head turned worrying towards Wilson. Before the oncologist could prepare himself, House raised the stick slightly, got a short backswing and slapped him across the shins.

Wilson swore, loudly. "House, what the hell?"

House looked back and forth between Alice and Wilson a few times before taking a few wobbly steps towards the hospital wing door, both of them following him at a run. As he opened it, the room turned to look at him.

"I think we might have something here, Dr. House," said Ian, who seemed to have taken over proceedings alongside Hailley.

House shook his head and raised his hand for silence… then shook his head again, and raised his hand again, as if to shake away the clouds. He turned instead to Madame Pomfrey. "Wizards take less… damage," he said. Then, thinking about what he had said, he followed up with "A question. That was… question."

"Mr. House, are you all right?" asked Professor Sprout, who moved towards him until brushed her away with his free hand.

"Wizards… take less…" he squeezed his eyes shut as if trying to force his brain to create the right words. "Wizards are more durable than Muggles?"

There was a confused silence about the room, broken, to everyone's surprise, by Marie. "My uncle once fell twenty feet off a broom and only broke his wrist."

Madame Pomfrey let a smile slowly creep onto her face. "Ah, yes. Not a very good first impression by our future Professor Longbottom, and certainly not the last time I've seen him in here."

Marie's eyes went wide, her hands clapped to her mouth and she ran quickly out of the room, wailing. Madame Pomfrey looked to Professor Sprout, wondering what she had said. House barred his teeth, irritated that his question was being ignored yet again.

"Oh… oh dear," said Professor Sprout. "The poor little thing's been _mortified_ someone would find out she's related to a teacher. I've been hoping it would get out, she's actually quite friendly when she's comfortable. Oh… I'll go see if I can talk to her." And she went off after her charge. Ian shot Wilson a look and they exchanged a shrug to confirm neither of them knew a thing about it.

House stamped his cane to the ground and everyone looked back to him. Catching Madame Pomfrey's eye, he asked "So is that a yes?"

"Well, yes I suppose."

"Wake the other teachers," House said to Wilson, "and the headmistress." He paused for a moment and then blinking purposefully. "Never mind," he said then, with a sudden confidence. "I'll do it."

Madame Pomfrey watched him stumble past (and slightly into) the door frame, eyebrow raised. "I'm sure she'll be delighted."

* * *

_Stop! You now know everything House does. Can you figure out what happened to Clayton Tanner? You have two weeks from today to think it over, talk it over with friends and work out your solution. The solution has already been written (so you can't influence it!) and will be posted at the end of those two weeks (originally August 2008, 12:00 EST. Solution is now up!)._

_Remember that House knows everything you know about every scene. Whether or not he was there isn't a factor: someone told him or he worked it out some other way. He's House, after all!_

_For convenience's sake (and because I sometimes have to create new kinds of magic), all magical knowledge, new or from the books, that you need to work out the solution is in this fic. If it's magical but not in the fic (even if it's an oversight), it's not part of the solution! However, real world knowledge is up to you! And that's it! You have two weeks!_


	4. A Stopper in Death Solution

"This is unheard of!"

The paintings watched Professor McGonagall storm past them in her nightdress from behind as much cover as their scenery would allow them. They were forewarned by Professor Sprout, who was leading the former from a safe distance.

"The headmistress of Hogwarts, _ordered_ out of her bed in the middle of the night by a drunken _lunatic_!"

They were the last to arrive at the common room – a bad side effect of the slowly turning staircase that lead to the headmistresses' office and adjoining quarters. The students – along with Marie, who was feeling awkward enough surrounded by her peers, and Ian who had no idea what to say to the older students – were sitting on or around a bed on the far side of the room, eyes wide when they saw McGonagall. The teachers had formed around Madame Pomfrey had formed a semi-circle around Clayton, who was more immediately surrounded by Wilson, Alice and House, the last of whom seemed to be quite dedicatedly poking him in the arm.

"House," Wilson cautioned as the headmistress entered. "House!" House jerked up suddenly and grabbed his temple at the subsequent head rush.

"Mr. House," said McGonagall with a tone that would have sent any of her students into an uncontrollable quivering, and did, if the students on the far side of the room were any indication. "You have five minutes to justify this before I give serious consideration to expelling you like I should have months ago."

"Abso… absolutely your honour," House said as he staggered within breathing range of McGonagall, who recoiled. "Let's," he said, gesturing wildly with his free hand, his nose almost touching hers, "bring everyone up to speed, shall we?"

"For starters," he said, walking over to the desk and knocking the closed container of wart powder to the ground with his walking stick. "You might want to get some lawyers to talk to whoever made this. It's got a hot compress in it that isn't on the label. It fuelled the ashwinders that went into the potions and let the things escape."

McGonagall turned swiftly to Slughorn, whose eyes had narrowed to vengeful slits. "Horrace?"

"Give me ten minutes with the sample and I can prove it."

She nodded. "Excellent. A good start, Mr. House, but not enough to justify waking the whole staff."

House raised a wobbly finger and approached her again. "Not quite everything I have, Miss. There was more in that ath… ack… ass? Wilson, didn't I just say it a few seconds ago?"

"Ashwinder."

"Right! That thing. There was more in it than meets the… well I guess it doesn't really meet the eye because you can't exactly see—"

McGonagall, whose expression had been tightening more and more since she had entered the room, raised her wand and placed its tip on House's forehead. There was a flash of light and he stood up abruptly and straight, shuddered and looked around.

"…as I was saying," he said in a clear, determined tone as he began to pace back and forth. "The kid's not still asleep because of the burns, he's asleep because of something in his potion. Since the only thing," he nodded to Slughorn, who nodded back after a distracted glare at the wart powder, "that was in the potion base was the ashwinder egg, it had to be something that was in the ashwinder. Something that it couldn't or hadn't had a chance to digest yet."

Hagrid spoke up. "But Professor Longbottom told me you said nothing in the fire would work for a sleeping potion!"

House laughed. "Sleeping potion? Who's looking for a sleeping potion?"

Wilson, the students and Neville all looked up in surprise at once. House looked at them like they were all adorable toddlers mis-reading the alphabet.

"It doesn't match the newest symptom, you'll see," he said with a shrug towards the piece of paper hanging haphazardly to the wall. "When we were in the greenhouse, we discounted the wood, the powder and anything that could be on the wood. But that's not the only thing in the fire, is it, Professor Hagrid?"

Hagrid sighed. "Like I told the kids, Mr. House, I might have forgotten something but really, I didn't put anything in."

House rolled his eyes. "There are windows in this castle, you know," he said. "I saw you throwing the leftovers from your meal into the fire the day one of the days I was stuck outside of the common room chatting with that insufferable gargoyle."

Hagrid's face reddened.

"Anyways, this all hinges on what you were eating, or rather, what you weren't eating, the day before the injury. I can work that out pretty easily. Professor Slughorn's been giving out leftovers from his regionally themed parties, and the day before the injury it was—"

"Josh Kiryu's birthday." It was Alice speaking. "Clayton and I both went because I was invited and I didn't want to be left alone with the Slytherins."

House nodded. "And since Mr. Kiryu is from Honshu, that means Slughorn was serving…"

Alice nodded. "Japanese food." She snorted. "At least Josh actually grew up with the stuff." If Slughorn had heard and understood the jibe, he showed no sign.

Wilson's eyes lowered. House couldn't possibly be going where he thought he was going with this… House looked at him and smiled.

"You see, this has been a case of three major misassumptions. We've all been assuming Clayton was hit by a sleeping potion. You've all been assuming Wilson and I knew you have super resistances for some reason. And Wilson and I have been assuming that if none of you can work out what happened to the kid, it must be something high and mighty, mystical and magical. Not something so trite and cliché that it's showed up in every hack mystery novel, tv show and video game since their authors decided they'd rather use a deus ex machina than actually plan things out."

"House, have you lost your mind?" Wilson asked, taking to his feet. "The kid's unconscious. Tetradotoxin is a lethal poison! He's not _dead._"

The Hogwarts staff looked on at the two of them, baffled, but House looked far too smug to be taken down.

"Of course it's a lethal poison. It wasn't mixed with anything to counteract it."

"Excuse me," coughed Slughorn, who was at least able to follow half the conversation. "Just what are you two talking about?"

House replied in a far too cheerful manner. "Fugu poisoning! Perfectly lethal and undetectable, even in small doses, great when you want to figure out why the CSI team can't solve the case after one spin in the spectrometer." Even though the pronouncement didn't have the result on the crowd he was hoping, he still looked at Slughorn and said "You really need to double check what you order for dinner."

Madame Pomfrey approached him. "But James is right, Mr. House. The poor boy isn't dead. This poison can't be the cause of this."

House ignored her, turning back to the bed momentarily before swinging about, carrying what was left of the bottle of firewhisky. "Drink, Professor McGonagall?

The headmistress scoffed. "My goodness no. Unlike some people, I don't drink while I'm on the job."

"But if you were going to drink," House asked with a twinkle in his eye. "How much would it take to get you as drunk as I was a few minutes ago?"

McGonagall gave him a forced polite smile. "Mr. House, as a respected figurehead in the magical community, I would never get as drunk as you were a few minutes ago."

House sighed. "Then as a respected member of the magical community, how much do you drink?"

"I have a personal limit of two glasses when I drink whisky."

House, to her surprise, grinned. "That's funny, I only had three mouthfuls and I practically split my head on your stone walls." He wheeled abruptly. "See, Wilson, I have a theory. Obviously this whisky is way, _way_ too strong. I asked myself why? Why make whisky stronger? Is it to enhance the taste, or is it to get shitfaced?"

Wilson didn't really know what to say to that, so House thankfully interrupted him as he was opening his mouth. "You see, these wizards don't just get extra protection against cuts and scrapes. They don't get drunk as easily as we do, either. So I was standing there, just after I hit you in the leg, in fact—"

"Thanks for that, by the way," Wilson interrupted.

"You're welcome. And I thought to myself, 'My god, these people must have the most remarkable livers…'"

It dawned on Wilson slowly, like a ray of moonlight from the evening sky through the windows. "And the primary function of the liver is to remove poison from the body!"

"Exactly," said House, triumphant. "I bet you people could drink nightshade tea and wouldn't blink, in fact it would explain why it's in so many potions with only a few diluters. But when you drink a small dose of one of the strongest poisons known to Muggle-kind, I'd bet you end up looking," he pointed to Clayton with his stick, "like that."

Madame Pomfrey looked Clayton over from a distance. "That's all very nice, Mr. House, but I don't want to begin treatment for a Muggle poison that you yourself said cannot be detected!"

"You know," House said after an intake of breath through his teeth. "I've never really been a fan of deus ex machina. So here're three signs that I'm right and better than you." Her eyebrows shot up but he was still talking. "Number one: there was nowhere the poison could have come from but the Japanese food. That doesn't prove anything on its own, since a sleeping potion could have come from the other food items, but two and three will handle that.

"Number two: the ashwinder wasn't affected by whatever was in it that knocked out the kid. It wasn't even affected after it hit the potion base. If it had been a sleeping potion ingredient, or maybe if it had just been something that caused a natural coma, it would have been knocked out and even its enhanced fire would have been smothered."

Hagrid, his eyes excited, took to his feet. "But an ashwinder can't die until its fire is completely out! Not even to a lethal poison! It would have just kept going like nothing was wrong!"

House pointed at him with a finger gun and smiled. "Excellent, that's our number two. The number three, of course, should be obvious!" He swung his hand dramatically towards Clayton and waited. And waited. And waited, and sighed. "Fugu," he said past the sigh. "Fugu is the Japanese word for pufferfish."

All at once the other students took to their feet.

"And pufferfish…" started Hailley.

"Are the key ingredient in Swelling Solution!" shouted Ian, his arms still pecked with marks from his failed attempt to create one.

The whole group of them swarmed Clayton's bed, shocking Alice to her feet, and Toby carefully lifted his wrist.

"He hasn't gained weight at all!" he said.

Marie grinned along with the rest of them. "He's just blowing up like a balloon!"

Surrounded by the children's honest grins and House's insufferable, McGonagall hesitated for only a moment before saying "Poppy?"

Madame Pomfrey nodded. "I can deflate him in a few minutes and get to work on any poison they throw at me. Mr. Wilson?"

"Yes?" Wilson asked, confused.

"Ready a deflating solution, have Miss Gauge do the necessary charms. Quickly, everyone!"

Everyone shuffled out of the room, leaving Wilson, Madame Pomfrey and Hailley to their work, except for McGonagall, who tried to help however she could, and Slughorn and Hagrid, who were apologizing profusely even as she tried to remind them that it was neither of their faults. No one left faster than House, who was at the tower, past the gargoyle and in bed before anyone could follow him. He went to sleep immediately, soundly, and with that insufferable grin still plastered across his face.

* * *

Wilson looked up and down the Hogwarts Express with a huge sigh. One year behind him, he thought. It was a good start.

He had said his goodbyes to Ian, David and Marie, who had run off to grab a seat together, the girl eagerly in the lead. He had also able to tip a nod to Toby and Hailley during the closing feast (Ravenclaw had scraped together a win in the House Cup for the first time in almost a hundred years, thanks to the three Ravenclaw's help in helping Clayton Tanner back to his feet).

As for Tanner himself, Wilson caught him chatting amicably with a fellow Gryffindor about their grades, between the tired looks they cast Alice and her boyfriend of two months, who were locked at the lips and hadn't let go.

"Ah, high school love," said House, bumbling over with two more bags than he had arrived with, no doubt full of things that were only questionably his. "Is there any purer kind?" He butted Wilson with his shoulder. "C'mon, I hear they have jellybeans that taste like dog shit. I want to grab some while they're still there. Should be great at parties."

Wilson shook his head and took a step into the train, turning around and taking out his wand. "Here, let me help you with that."

One spell. One year, one spell. He'd have to pick up the pace. But for now it was good enough to levitate in House's bags, and to hear his friend say "Show off."

They settled into a car and waited until the train started moving. House was playing with something in his pocket, and Wilson assumed that it was his container of vicodin until he caught a glimpse of it as they were turning around a bend.

"House… is that…"

"Love potion," he said, grinning. "Also great at parties."

* * *

_So I remembered to upload this all week until about lunch this morning. So I'm two hours late! I'm sure no one cares._

_So it's been a year since I wrote the first chapter for House Potter (though I put it on much later). I will make no excuses for this. I hope you enjoy it all the same!_

_For this chapter I had to create_ _a problem only House and Wilson could solve, and the Pufferfish/Swelling Solution thing was what led me to it. I had to make up a few things about Ashwinders stolen from other mythical creatures, but I think it holds up._

_Here's a few notes for anyone that cares about my thought process:_

_I realised as the story went on that Hogwarts House students could be placed in a house at the _end_ of a year, so they can earn house points that would be slapped on to their new home, but decided it was too late to make the change. I don't know if it would be fair or not, but it would have definitely been what I had gone with if I had another chance._

_There were a few changes to the chapter along the way. For example: Marie's parents were, in one draft, killed during the war (in another, she was Neville's daughter but the timeline just doesn't hold up at all for that. If you're wondering, she's Hanna's brother's kid). I figured, given the student's ages, that it would only make sense to explore how the last of the children who lost relatives in the war are getting on, and then compare them to kids in the later years' students (in later chapters) who weren't affected by the war at all. And then I remembered "Oh, right, I'm supposed to be writing a House crossover here," and went back to torquing Hogwarts' rules into such a contortion that they let a cantankerous old muggle bully wander the halls as he pleased._

"Soffoquoi_", you ask? Babelfish tells me "sofoque" is Italian for "smother", which is the best I could come up with (he's trying to smother the fire! Not Clayton!). It would just sound artificial if I used non-english term for "extinguish" as the word sounds pretty much the same in all the Latinized languages. At least, that's all I cared to find before I got lazy._

_There are a few in-jokes here, as well as Harry Potter-wide jokes, like the Draught of Living Death. No one really knows what it does, and only the not-really-canon POA video game offers an explanation. Naturally, that's what House is getting at when he shoots the idea down during the first Ducklings scene. Ironically, its effects from POA would be perfect for the situation, but I chose to ignore that._

_A lot of names from things I was reading or playing wormed their way into this (normally I wouldn't let that happen, but it's a comedy fanfic and I decided to have some fun). Some examples include "Hallia" and "Kleiner" (a hint for where "Kleiner" came from: I had to bite my tongue to keep from calling Lurich's formulas "Vance's" formulas instead). The "git" Josh Kiryu is named after the git Josh Kiryu in The World Ends With You. Which you should all play, by the way._

_And lastly, in the first note back there? I totally spelled "house" with a capital H. Yeeeah…_


	5. Change in the Maze Part 1

A raucous cheer, the clashing of heavy tankards in a toast and the bar picked up the second chorus of a song only half of them knew and less of them were actually singing. A man in his middle age and an older boy, probably seventh year at Hogwarts, were doing the real lifting, singing in their deep baritone about a Cornish troll that couldn't hold its brew.

To one side of the seventh year sat his girlfriend, who clapped along with the tune, the two of them only the tip of the iceberg when it came to Hogwarts students in the pub. At least a dozen had been through, and many had stayed for a bottle of butterbeer as they caught up with one another about their summers. At that moment, newly sixth year Sasha Dashkov and fourth year Nathanial Marsh were hunched over their table, talking in lowered but pointed voices; it would have been clear to anyone watching them that they were planning something, perhaps filling in the blanks left by their now graduated partner-in-crime, who had returned to Japan to turn his resources towards more personal goals. In one corner of the room sat a confused and nervous looking first-year girl with her obviously baffled Muggle parents, and to one side of the bar sat three new second-years who were animatedly discussing the Quidditch season. Through the mess weaved a blonde witch with a platter full of drinks hovering a few inches above and behind her shoulder. She settled by the second years and handed each one of them a butterbeer from the tray.

"Can I get you anything else, dears?"

"No thanks, Aunt Hannah," said the curly haired girl, and the three of them waited with a very adolescent grasp for privacy until she was again far away before they continued debating the season. Hannah gave an indignant raise of her eyebrows before she had turned away to the next table, and exaggerated a haughty walk as she went.

She kept her ear on the singers as she went, and had to return to the back of the bar briskly as they came to the end of the song as, as she had predicted, the middle aged man called out "Hannah, another round!" and she was back to work. She was disappointed to find herself short exactly one glass of Firewhisky, and began to scrounge under the bar in hopes of finding a spare bottle instead of going to the back. It was as she found an old bottle snug in the back of the shelf, which she dusted off with her sleeve, that she heard one of the second-year boys yell "Oi, look who it is!"

Hannah extracted herself from the bar to find a middle-aged man walking into her bar. He was in Muggle clothes – actual Muggle clothes, she noted, not the disjointed sort one often found hanging to wizards using the front door – and looked just as awkward as he had the first time she had seen him almost a year ago, though this time, as he walked slowly into the room, he fiddled with a wand at his hip. Hannah couldn't help notice the two older students look up at him from their table, but he didn't immediately notice them, seeing the younger ones waving at him instead, and walked towards them. She followed.

"Afternoon, James," greeted one of the boys – David – who pulled up the chair beside him, which the much older man accepted. He nodded to the other two.

"Ian, Marie," he said, more off-balance at being re-plunged into the magical world than gruff. Hannah had seen the kind, though they were usually Muggle-born kids, and the expression came from the slow realization that the last year of their life actually was not a dream.

"We were just talking about the season," said Ian almost as way of greeting. "Did you follow, over in the States?"

Seeing he had not, in fact, been following the Quidditch season in the States, Hannah sidled up to the table and gave a tiny cough.

"Why Mr. Wilson," she said as if she had just seen him. "Can I get you anything?"

He looked around with a certain look on his face. Hannah knew that one too, with disappointment: the look of someone who had forgotten what there was to order. "Urm… just water, please."

She smiled politely as she could as the pad that hovered near her right shoulder scribbled down his request. She had to shuffle off, of course, to serve drinks to the rest of the crowd, but when she returned with a glass of water she piped up again in what was probably too rehearsed a voice. "My, what do you know, last time you came in here I thought you were an American that just didn't know where the door to Diagon Alley was, and the next thing I know you're the most famous American wizard in the whole country!" He just nodded politely and accepted his glass. Hannah shrugged inwardly and gave up. She had tried.

As a matter of fact, Wilson knew very well what it meant to be the most famous American wizard in the country – or rather, the most famous Squib in the country, which was an ill fame at best. He and McGonagall had managed to keep down the news that someone had firebombed his former office at Princeton-Plainsboro, and it had only been to his surprise to find that someone had tarred and feathered the inside of his entire apartment just in time for him to get back home at the start of the summer.

"Neo-Death Eaters," spat the large wizard who lived down the street. He had simply been coming to welcome Wilson home but seemed to take the prank as an affront and had immediately helped with the cleanup. "Desperate for someone to hate before they all fall apart." Pranks and acts of terrorism were one thing, but it was the smaller things that had proved impossible to hide: the anonymous Howlers, each one of them marked with cut up newspaper bits that created a voice that sounded like an 80s computer imitating a scratched record player. It was probably because of the Howlers that his friends knew well enough to say nothing in front of Hannah.

"That's my aunt," Marie introduced Wilson to her retreating back, in a tone that articulated her mood more than enough. Given the natural connection, she then pointed to a couple at the table next to them and added "And that's my mum and da."

Mr. and Mrs. Abbot waved to Wilson, but seemed to realise they weren't welcome at the children's table and left them be. Wilson was almost glad. There was a part of him complaining that he shouldn't be hanging around with children in public, but that was mostly buried under the relief of how normal talking to his friends felt compared to the rest of the magical world at that moment.

The three immediately picked up their conversation about the Quidditch season, unwittingly leaving Wilson out in the dark. Wilson had tried to find if there were any American Quidditch leagues, but had instead spent a day trying to understand the rules of some other game they seemed to favour in the States involving exploding balls. That had been the day an agent from the Federal Wizarding Bureau of Investigation had dropped by for some completely superfluous questioning about the firebombing months before. He remembered the unfortunate conversation with the FWBI agent.

"It's all in the Fifth and First Half Amendment: Wizarding citizens of the United States will have incidents involving them investigated by the Secretary of Magic or his associates. It's right here—" she had said as if the constitution was laid out on the table in front of them, "—you can see it with any simple revealing solution."

"Oh really," he had asked, "and are there any other laws I've spent life unaware of?"

"Well there's the Thirteenth and Second Quarter amendment that kept the window open for House Elf slavery, which was only visible using a brightening charm, but it was repealed by amendment Twenty-One-R, which is only visible on Tuesdays."

"Well that's just rediculo—Tuesdays?"

"Yes sir. No one looks at the constitution on Tuesdays."

"Is there a charm that does that?"

"No sir, that's a plain statistical fact."

In fact, the more Wilson thought back at the summer, the happier he was to be back in Britain.

Eventually it occurred to him to ask a question. "Have… any of you seen House?"

Ian and David looked at one another, and shrugged. Wilson, who noticed the Slytherins as the conversation went on, turned to them and repeated the question. They seemed almost as confused as him, almost as if they had been expecting House by now. When the question had finally made its rounds to Hannah, who shook her head, Wilson sighed.

"He disappeared on me at the airport. I had a feeling that he knew where to find a Portkey and just left me behind in coach, but maybe he just missed the plane?" They shrugged, which didn't help. Wilson didn't like not knowing where House was. Anything that gave House the element of surprise, purposeful or accidental, was a bad thing.

Just then the heavier drinkers picked up in song again, and the two rowdiest singers suddenly took up on their feet and began to dance. The combination of song and hard stomping made it impossible to keep up a conversation, and all Wilson could do was try to keep up with the lyrics.

_Whisht lads, hold your gobs, I'll tell you all an awful story…_

It was somewhere in the middle of the second verse when the seventh year boy suddenly lost his footing and slipped, falling almost head-first into a man that was coming out from the back rooms.

"Whoa, all right there, Travers?"

The boy collected himself back to his feet, nodded at his girlfriend that he was okay, and said "Oh, no trouble Professor."

The man smiled and nodded, and as the song picked up again around him, tamer this time around, he walked over to the bar.

"I got six and fifteen cleared out, Hannah. We're pretty much ready for a full house except for nine."

"Yes, of course. We're going to need to call in a professional to clean up those Horklumps. But don't worry about that, Neville, look who's here."

She pointed, and Wilson found himself the subject of a hearty "James Wilson! Welcome to the Leaky Cauldron!" as Professor Longbottom came over to greet him. He ignored Marie completely as per the pattern they had set at Hogwarts, and she took a long drink from her butterbeer as if she didn't know him either. "How was your trip? Is House doing all right?"

"Actually, I don't have the slightest idea where House is," Wilson admitted yet again.

"Left him back in the States," Ian repeated. Professor Longbottom didn't seem at all surprised to see it.

"He'll turn up. I saw Hailley Gauge last week with a few of her friends, but that's about it. Did you ask Sasha and Nathan?" He jerked his head towards the Slytherins, who for once failed to notice the attention as they seemed embroiled in an even more intense discussion.

Wilson shook his head. "They haven't seen him. At least not that they're admitting." He decided to change the subject. "So how has your summer been?"

"Oh, I can't complain," he said. "Went to visit the Thomases and the Macmillans – old school friends of Hannah and mine. Luna and Rolf invited us to go join them with something they're investigating in Russia, but setting up for the school year takes longer than you'd think. Speaking of which, I guess you're here to do some shopping?"

"Well, not so much, it's a short list" Wilson said, and Professor Longbottom laughed.

"Better than my second year," he muttered, as Wilson pulling out his Hogwarts list and continued in detail.

"_Standard Book of Spells Grade 2_, fresh potions kit, and 'be sure to bring extra raspberries'."

"Rashberries," the Professor said without even looking at the list.

Wilson squinted at the list. "I… urm… thought that was a spelling mistake."

"No, rash-berries. Because guess what happens when you get their juice on your bare skin. They're a crucial ingredient in—"

"Stain, sore and growth removal," said Ian out of nowhere. Seeing the surprised look from the Professor as well as his classmates, he blushed slightly. "I've been, urm, studying up. You know, for Slughorn."

"You mean for House," said David with a tinge of annoyance.

"Yeah, well… well…"

Neville shook his head almost as in surrender. "Anyway, Dr. Wilson, someone always 'loses' their rashberries. Usually all over Filch's things, if he doesn't confiscate it first. So we're trying to get people to bring a few extra." His eyes glanced slightly to the side, as if he was thinking, and then he added, "of course, you don't exactly have a limited student's budget, am I right? Well I was just thinking, kind of unrelated but…" he said, seeing the apprehension in Wilson's eyes. "If you wanted to, you could get a simple plant like a rashberry bush, or maybe a bobotuber, and grow it in your dorm. If you keep it healthy, it'll have paid for itself in potion supplies pretty quickly. A few sickles here and there can add up. And if you get really good at it, you can grow some things that aren't in the student stores, good for side projects."

Wilson thought about it, trying to ignore that his classmates had somehow gone from talking about House to talking about the House Cup. It was probably true, he did have more money than the other students, but it wasn't as though he had it all in Wizarding currency – in fact at the moment he didn't have a thin knut. There was going to be more than last year once he got to Gringotts, since he had a better grasp on the currency, but still, 'a few sickles here and there…'.

"Where could I get something like that?"

Professor Longbottom asked him for a sheet of paper, waved his wand and soon Wilson had a rough map to the other side of Diagon Alley where a flower shop apparently sold all kinds of magical plants. He decided this was as good a time as ever to take his leave, shook hands with Professor Longbottom, said his goodbyes to his classmates and waved to the Abbotts before making his way past the singers to the door that lead into Diagon Alley. The boy stumbled again as he passed him, and Wilson took the opportunity to guide him into the chair next to his girlfriend. He raised his glass to Wilson in salute, a glass, he noted, that Hannah had filled with butterbeer instead of firewhisky, and Wilson ducked aside to head to the old wall.

The girlfriend scratched an itch on the back of her hand, and didn't notice as two, tiny, soft white petals drifted off of it and onto the floor.

* * *

House Potter: Year 2

Change in the Maze

* * *

_The Diagon Gardens  
Formerly Earnest Desmond's Animated Muggle Photo-Graphy  
Wizards bound to Muggle London are asked to  
conceal all magical paraphernalia including wands,  
__cauldrons, brooms, etc._

Wilson stepped into the shop, which he found at the far end of Diagon Alley, totally opposite to the Leaky Cauldron, as he finished his shopping. It was significantly later in the afternoon, as he had taken a long lunch break while he perused his new _Standard Book of Spells_, and he was feeling just about ready to return to his hotel room and rest away the rest of the week until he had to go to the train for the very first time.

"Good afternoon!" chirped a distant voice the moment Wilson had opened the door.

He looked around, expecting to see some kind of bizarre wizarding plant talking back to him, but instead found himself surrounded by heavy gray canvas, alone. He stood and stared momentarily, wondering if he had come in the wrong door, when a woman, pushing fifty, with red-brown hair stuck her head through a gap in the curtain.

"Shopping or going out?" she asked.

"Uh… shopping I suppose."

She quickly handed him a plastic bag with the label "Amber Petals" written on it in gold ink as if it were the name of a store.

"All magical paraphernalia into the bag, please, cross the room, stairs on the right. If you keep your wand on you, keep it hidd—"

There was a tinkling sound, the kind made by a bell hung over a door, and the woman vanished, trailing the greeting of a salesman to some other stranger as she walked away. Wilson was still quite confused, but the instructions had been fairly explicit. He packed his things into the plastic bag and pushed out past the curtain, finding himself in the back of a perfectly Muggle flower shop.

The woman who had greeted him stood at a counter near the door, taking an order from a Muggle at the front desk. Through the window at the opposite end, Wilson caught sight of a car driving by, and it slowly dawned on him that this store stood as the opposite-end entrance to Diagon Alley. He was immediately struck by the contrast between the clean but boring Muggle shop and the energy of the Leaky Cauldron – clearly the hospitality business was a better industry for magical entrances than flower shops and stores that catered in "Animated Muggle Photography".

Taking a look to his right as instructed, Wilson saw the stairs in question. They were marked "Staff Only" but were concealed on one side by a shelf of tulip bulbs that were identical on both sides of the shelf. Wilson was impressed by the simple psychological trick. It gave wizards bound to the stairs an excuse to be there, while very few patrons would actually squish themselves between a shelf, wall and doorway when a perfectly good identical shelf was on the opposite side.

He made his way across the room, making a big deal about examining the bulbs, and when he felt the Muggle was looking the other way, he slipped down the stairs. The spiralled, which was odd enough already for a semi-modern Muggle building, and ended with another door that had no handle and was labelled with a rusty "Exit" sign. Taking the clue, Wilson looked back over his shoulder, drew his wand and touched it to the doorway. The wand made a jingling sound on contact, exactly like the bell upstairs, and the door swung open.

"Good morning!" called a new woman from the room beyond, but Wilson could not see her. Just beyond the doorway he found a curtain of ivy, and had to push his way through. On the far side of the mesh he found a curious sight: an impossibly high ceiling covering plants that grew in every direction, covering the walls and ceiling as though he were in the darkest depths of a forest that shifted from cold weather to hot just across the room, all of which sprouted not from soil but from planters and gardens held back by simple retaining walls, all of which were scattered on a plain, industrial tile floor. On the tropical side of the room, beyond a thinner but similar vine-mesh, Wilson spotted a sign hanging in mid air without visible means of support that read "Wizards at Work – Do Not Cross".

"Good evening," he replied to the woman, who he found carrying a pot to the side of an island counter that held an old fashioned cash register. Inside the pot was a thin-stalked plant that snaked around a wooden dowel that had been thrust into the soil. It had thick, cactus-flower like bulbs growing along its side, each seemingly too heavy to be held up by the vine itself, and the plain, pointed tip of the stem seemed to follow him around the room.

"Is it really evening? I suppose that's what I get for working underground." She pointed vaguely upwards and Wilson noticed the smallest sliver of light leaking through the leaves above their heads. "Looking for anything in particular?"

"Well, sort of. I'm looking for a plant that can be used in Potions or medicine, but a simple one because I'm not really very experienced with growing plants on my own." It was not entirely true, but Wilson felt it kept him from revealing his peculiar situation to a stranger.

She looked thoughtful for a moment. "Hrm. Well, there are a few simple bushes and flowers, but are you looking for a…" she paused for a moment and seemed to decide that she needed to talk down to be understood. "A plant you'd be able to harvest from every year or a plant you'd have to replant every year?"

Wilson couldn't help but feel a little insulted. "Perennial, please."

She gave him a half smile. "Smarter than you look, aren't— Jasper, down!"

Before Wilson could figure out at whom she yelled, she had collected a small brochure from beside the cash and struck the potted plant across the top of its stem. It turned the stem, which had been pointed, reaching slowly, in his direction, Wilson looked down and realised one of the plant's bulbs, suspiciously pointed towards him, had parted slightly and a slimy white tuber had emerged from it and was quickly retreating back into the bulb.

The saleswoman smiled again. "Don't mind him. Jasper's just a little cranky after a trimming." As if to appear busy, but more probably to lead him away from the plant, she began to pace through her store. Seeing her back, Wilson noticed the greying roots in her hair and the silver trowel she had shoved into her work belt. "Now this," she said, and unable to see her finger Wilson mistakenly assumed she was pointing at one of the coniferous trees on the cold side of the room that gleamed with golden needles, but she knelt down and pointed him towards a small flower that looked like a white flowered butterfly weed.

She held up a delicate branch. "This is a glitterbulb plant. They grow straight into midwinter, but you have to keep them out of the snow. A little after new years they grow tiny pear-shaped bulbs that… well, they glitter." Wilson nodded. "They're not very big, about half as wide as your little finger and they're mostly seed, but if you juice the lot of them you'll have enough for a potion or two per plant. Bright reddish pink stuff that'll dominate the colour of any potion you mix it with."

"Well," Wilson said, taking a flower gently in hand to look at it more carefully. "It's not as much as I'd like… what are the juices good for?"

"Numbing," the woman said, "and it feels fizzy, which some people like for flavouring even if it does stick their tongue out of action for half an hour. You know how some potions can taste."

Wilson nodded, but felt like House would find that a greater curiosity than him. "Anything else?"

"Well… the tropical plants are seeding, so I can sell you seeds at a discount." She pointed to the tropical rainforest section of the room to a plant that grew out of a magically prepared rotten tree stump. It grew down and looked like a bulb-spotted cloak draped flaccidly over two hooks, but as he moved to examine it closer he found an outstretched arm in his way. "Don't walk straight for it. If it can get a bead on you it'll dump a stench into the air like a dead body."

"What's the point of that?"

"Loki weed. Nasty little thing. Grows out of carrion or dead tree trunks. Can't survive unless it's got its roots into a dead thing. Bulbs are full of seeds, but they have a long sharp core you have to watch out for. Hates sloths," she added, as though this were as common as whether or not the plant grew in the shade. "Likes harpy eagles, I suppose. Following?"

"I didn't know plants had such complicated relationships. How can you tell?"

"The sloths'll bite open the bulbs but they're useless, 'cause where will a sloth find something dead unless it stumbles onto a bad tree? So it starts smelling like meat the eagle shows, then it uses the eagles to help find meat."

"Why the spitting?" Wilson asked.

"Oh," the woman scratched at the back of her head. She seemed surprised at him even asking the question. "Well… it just plain doesn't like us."

Wilson shook his head, more than a little overwhelmed. "I'm starting to wonder if this might not be the hobby for me. What's it good for?"

"Growth serums," she said, "once mulched and—stop!"

Wilson, reacting out of instinct, jerked backwards from her warning and bumped into something behind him. He started to turn, realising that he must have crossed into one of the other exhibits, and she pushed him back with the sudden energy of a woman half her age. Wilson turned to see what all the fuss was about, and was shocked by what he saw: a young witch, barely into adulthood, with dark hair and a mask in her left hand, a black tattoo cut into her arm just above the mask. The other arm outstretched, carrying a wand pointed at his heart.

The older witch snarled with disgust at the stranger. "Reddikulus!"

To Wilson's surprise, the witch faltered, heaved, and fell backwards in a sudden whirl of motion. Before he could see what was happening, she fell backwards into a huge plant in the exhibit nearest to her, which coiled its fronds about her and seemed to swallow her up.

The elder witch punched her hands together. "That was Maureen," she said with a scowl, "who was _not supposed to leave her house._"

The large plant, Wilson saw in surprise, seemed to curl away, as if shamed. The woman gestured to it with her head. "That's a Phobopod. It grows sweet fruit good for Bravery potions. Trouble is, the poor thing grows the fruit before the seeds are ready, so it coaxes a Boggart to live with it year round. We tried to stop it but… well, Maureen moved in and now here we are." She shook her head darkly. "Would you believe mine used to be spiders? Two wars will do that to you."

"I…" Wilson couldn't help but look around, and got the unpleasant feeling that several of the plants were watching him. "Is there anything I can grow that won't… hate me?"

"No promises. But look here," she pointed to the ground of the simulated rainforest, where a pool of what looked like stagnant water revealed, at close range, to be filled with a web of tiny vines. In various places on the mesh were small clusters of seeds stacked inside a flower like a small pyramid.

"Spider vine," the woman said simply. "Thrives in water. Seeds are useless unless you want to grow more, and you don't really need to worry. Put it in fresh water and you'll have a carpet. When its flower petals fall off they can be turned into a Buoyancy Potion."

Wilson gave her a look. "Walk on water?"

She shook her head. "Nah, you'd slip right in, and then it would shoot you back out. But if you want to actually swim, it can be useful."

Wilson thought for a minute. "Is it easy to grow?"

She grinned. "Got a big tub of water, hedge clippers and about three minutes of spare time?"

* * *

Several days later, Wilson found himself once again in wizard's robes as he sat on the Hogwarts Express, nibbling awkwardly at a Chocolate Cauldron, a moist green blob of Spider Vine carefully kept in a container in his bag, and very much aware how out of place he looked among the other second years. Still, there was something very satisfying about watching the looming silhouette of Hogwarts come up over the horizon. He gathered his suitcase and let the others lead the way out of the train, as they stood on the platform and realised they had no idea which way to go.

"Firs' years!" cried Hagrid from one side of the platform, but that obviously was not for them. Having taken the boats there and back in their first year, the new Second Years stood baffled, and went with the flow of the crowd. They went down, off the platform, where they found a fleet of carriages sitting in a row. As the crowd cleared in front of them, Wilson stopped with a cry of disgust.

"What is it?" David asked from beside him.

"I…" he said, looking at the sickly-drawn skin of the winged horses with clinical worry. They ignored him in turn, the far one pawing at the ground. Wilson looked from them to his classmates and sighed at the absurdities of the wizarding world.

"Nevermind. Apparently you can't see them."

"See what?"

When they finally arrived at the front gates of the castle, it was Professor Flitwick who greeted them. "Second years this way, please! Second years!" He gathered them about him in a crowd that blocked him almost entirely from sight for those in the back rows. "Now," said the Charms Master's voice. "As you know, your time in Hogwarts House is now over, and it is time to be sorted into your proper Houses. We want you all to take your usual seats at the Hogwarts House table one last time while you prepare for Sorting. You will be called up alphabetically, and, once sorted, will be seated at the table of your new house. Good? Excellent! Now off you go."

Presumably he shooed away the nearest students, who immediately turned into the crowd to leave, and the resulting scuffled traffic jam took only a few minutes to resolve. Before they knew it, the second years were sitting at the Hogwarts House table for what, they realised, would probably be their last time. The other Houses gathered, greeting old friends in loud voices and making bets on the sorting in barely mumbled tones. The talk was high, and McGonagall looked out over the crowd with barely restrained anger, but kept her tone in the name of ceremony. It was to her relief when the tiny Professor Flitwick arrived, carrying a stool and the old school Sorting Hat, and began to call names.

"Abbot, Marie!" called Flitwick, standing next to the Sorting Hat. Marie, suddenly with a resurgence of last year's mousiness, slumped as she walked, and took absolutely no heart from the sudden eerie hush that fell over the room as the whole of Hogwarts, including the fresh crowd of first years, realized the sorting had truly begun.

Wilson had not truly appreciated the Sorting Hat the first time he had seen the sorting, he realized as he watched it that day. It was, in hindsight, far more terrifying. Where on earth was it going to put him? He didn't know anyone in Gryffindor. Not really, or in Hufflepuff. He didn't really want to be pinned down in Slughorn's house either, just on principle of not wanting to be near the man on such a regular basis. And to be in Ravenclaw with House for the next six year… could he even stand that?

The hat seemed to muse for a while, and then proclaimed "Hufflepuff!"

The Hufflepuff table cheered, Marie blushed, and Professor Longbottom quickly pushed aside a mildly confused expression before clapping uproariously for his niece. Marie passed them with a nervous smile, and Professor Flitwick went on.

"Benson, Tyler."

One by one, Wilson's classmates were peeled away from him to be scattered to the four winds. David and Ian landed themselves in Gryffindor, as did one of their roommates, while the other went to Slytherin against a scornfully betrayed look from them. At last, the table was cleared, and he sat alone until Flitwick turned to him and said: "Wilson, James".

He took to the steps in front of him, and sat down in the tiny stool, as Flitwick, having planned ahead for his excess height, stood behind him and charmed the hat to levitate slowly onto his head. All was quiet. Wilson did not know what to expect.

To Wilson's surprise, the hat tilted down and faced him upside down, like a kitten with a tentative understanding of gravity's power over exaggerated upside down flips over thin ledges.

"Hello!" it greeted. To open its mouth the hat had to flop its top half impressively backwards like a gymnast. "Delightful evening, isn't it?"

"Urm," he said out loud, noticing some of the other students snickering at the flopping hat, but realising he had never heard it speak conversationally to any of them. He thought it out quickly, and tried talking to it with his mind. "I… suppose?"

"Yes, well, to business I suppose…" The hat seemed to squirm momentarily, thinking. After an awkward moment that was probably not as long as he thought, Wilson decided to, in a sense, speak up.

"Trouble?"

"Oh, no," the hat said dismissively.

"It's because I'm a Squib," Wilson replied. There was a tone of regret in his thoughts. "Isn't it?"

"Eh?" The hat jostled about. Wilson supposed it was attempting to shake its head. "Be reasonable," the hat said. "Do you have any idea how many Squibs come through this school? Squibness isn't a yes or no, you know. It's a scale of ability. It's like math. Half of it is effort and half is ability. Some of the people getting D's and P's in this school aren't just there because they don't do their homework."

Wilson made a face. "That's sad."

"I didn't make the world," the hat muttered, but then seemed to wink at him. "I just tweak it from time to time."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean look around," it said, and pointed to the house tables. "Once upon a time, Godric Gryffindor waves his wand at me and says to give him and his friends the most appropriate students. Next thing I know it's a thousand years later and people are tearing each other up over it like it actually mattered in the world after school."

"Teenagers," Wilson said apologetically.

"Teenagers are smart. Mobs are stupid. I split them so they can learn in the best way possible, but they get together they get it in their heads that they're supposed to hate this, do that, act a certain way. But then," the hat mused, "something occurred to me. Do you care to hear it?"

Wilson was, admittedly, feeling fairly awkward about sitting in front of the school with the silent hat on his head, but did not know what else to say. "Sure?"

"_Godric Gryffindor isn't here any more._" The hat pointed outwards. "I have to split them, so I've done it like this since the war. Look," the hat pointed to the Ravenclaws. "Ravenclaws improve the world when it's stable with their brains. Slytherins keep the world together with their politics charisma and planning. Gryffindors rally the world when it falls apart with their bravery and Hufflepuffs piece it back together with their compassion."

Wilson was confused. "What… does this have to do with me?"

"I think you'll see in a minute. Now," the hat said as if remembering. "You asked me a question. Let me throw it back at you." The hat looked him hard in the eye. "Do _you _think being a Squib would affect where I place you?"

Wilson stopped. Oddly, he thought he had an idea as to what the hat was getting at. He thought for a moment, and then answered.

* * *

The seventh year NEWT Transfiguration students sat in the desks they had gotten comfortable in during their sixth year and exchanged greetings that had not been made in the common rooms the night before. One of the Hufflepuffs was telling them about her family trip to South America when Professor Leda came into the room, dragging her bag behind her and talking for all the world like their last class had been the day before.

"Wands out, possessions off of your desks. Turn a table into an aquarium and a clock—" she shook her bag "—into a stingray. Best one wins 20 points. Please make sure you've got the right kind of water for your ray. You know I hate to clean up dead fish."

She threw the bag onto her desk (it clattered and clanked like every clock in it was broken) and sat down on the back of it, her eyes still high enough to see across the classroom. The students were hastily collecting their things and splitting up to cover the room full of mostly empty desks. Professor Leda opened her bag and began to levitate the clocks – old clocks, a cuckoo clock and even a modern Muggle clock radio with a digital display that sat dim and unresponsive, just to keep them on their toes – towards her students.

"You have half an hour. I have things to cover today, you know."

She paced around the class after a few minutes of watching from her desk, and began to correct her two more struggling students while she let her protégés continue unhindered. It was a complicated assignment – on purpose, of course – as the first step involved transforming something simple (wood, mostly) into something complicated (wood or metal, plus glass containing a liquid, that latter of which was always horribly nasty, and any supporting systems like filters, pumps and decorations the students would need if they wanted to win the game) while the other involved turning something horribly complicated (intricate gears, or circuits) into something complicated in entirely different ways.

After around ten minutes, she felt confident they were on their way and returned to her desk to distract them. "So which one of you is it going to be?" she asked.

While a few faces looked up, wondering what she meant, there were a few other students who were so involved in their pre-spell planning (in one case, trying desperately to mop up what Professor Leda assumed was an entire aquarium made of water that had immediately collapsed) to even look up. She cleared her throat.

"Well it's happened every year since I started here. Someone always asks. It's not always my best student but someone will—ah, Headmaster!"

She called out the door, where her students found Professor McGonagall flanked by Professors Flitwick and Slughorn. The group had only just been walking past, and were quite surprised at being interrupted in their conversation, but Flitwick nodded a greeting.

"Good morning, seventh years. Professor Leda."

"Good morning, Professor Flitwick. I was just asking the class which one of them was going to ask me the big Transfiguration question."

The Headmistress looked a bit sour, which considering her normal moods was almost cheerful. "I can't imagine what forcing it out of them will accomplish."

"It's not forcing. I like to think of it as a game for me." Leda pointed to her blackboard, causing a complicated diagram to appear on it with a complicated, multi-part chain of images. While they had never seen the diagram, the students still recognized most of these images as illustrating key Transfiguration principles and how they linked together. One, for example, was of two foxes, one sniffing the ground intently and the other carrying a wand in its mouth, both with silhouettes of humans coming from them, representing the intelligence differences between human-animal Transfiguration and that of Animagi. In another section there was a demonstration of how changing one property would not affect another: a drawing of a wizard pre- and post- Disillusionment Charm measuring at the same height. In one corner of the diagram, even though two chalk arrows pointed to and one came from it, there lay a gap in the picture.

"It's a fundamental. Maybe it's not very common, and doesn't normally come up, but I can hardly see why the entire class should have to ignore it just because only one or two students ask a year. Someone will work it out. Someone always does. I just want to make a game of it." She smiled slightly. "The rest of you can play if you want."

McGonagall scoffed, and anyone watching her would have seen Professor Leda take a frightened, defensive step backwards. But Professor Slughorn seemed intrigued.

"Yes… yes, I see it. I wondered the same thing myself a few years after I got out of school when I was working on a potion to cure… well, but that would be a hint, wouldn't it? No, I think I'll take a part in your little game, Elizabeth. I have a fine sample of French wine I'd like to put up on the table for it, even, if you'd care to volunteer something yourself."

McGonagall looked surprised at Slughorn for a moment, and it seemed for a moment like she was about to put a stop to the goings-on. Still, years of teaching the subject had given her a good instinct into its nuances, and she could not help but give a low-lidded look around the classroom. She smiled confidently, and to the surprise of her co-workers, she followed up the glance by nodding to a witch at the front of the class. "Ambrose," she said, "and I'll put a bottle of mead out if that's what we're playing at." The girl seemed a mix surprised and pleased.

"Oh, fine," said Slughorn, as unconcerned as possible. "Go with the aspiring animagus, certainly. I daresay she'll manage it, the question is whether or not the question occurs to her before or after she finishes. I, in the meantime, am putting my lot with Hawkins. He's shown an aptitude for all the core magical subjects, just the kind of knowledge you'd need for this sort of thing."

"Fair enough," said Leda from the front of the class. "I'm going to go about a different way if I might, and put a box of Belgium chocolates I have on Ms. Chandler." The girl on the floor, still mopping up her water-aquarium, looked up surprised.

"What about you, Filius?" Slughorn asked the only teacher that had not placed a bet. "There's not need to hide it, we've all went with someone from our house." It was true: Ambrose was a Gryffindor, Hawkings a Syltherin, Emily Chandler a Hufflepuff. "Cutting it down like that, I'd say both your options are equally apt."

"Yes, well… I suppose I _was _going to go with…" Across the room there was the sound of a door opening and closing, but with all eyes on Flitwick, only he saw who had entered. A mischievous grin curled on his face. "…Never mind." His coworkers followed his gaze towards the chalkboard, surprised and confused looks on their face. "And I have an excellent new silver-plated quill I'd like to put down."

No one responded, they simple watched and waited with in a tense, exasperated silence. A finger reached out and drew a line from two of the images adjoining the gap, through the gap and across the single arrow to the image it pointed. It held them there for a moment, and then pulled away.

"Where's the exploded frog someone tried to turn into a prince?"

Flitwick tried to conceal a wry grin, Slughorn seemed oddly pleased, and with a scoff Professor Leda waved her wand at the chalkboard twice, first to gently nudge House out of the way. In the place of the gap came a picture that looked out of a restricted textbook: a gorilla lay there, silver-backed in chalk, strong and powerful, with human arms in the place of its own. It was dead.

"It is impossible," Leda said to the class as a whole, "to transfigure something that is not a human into a human." The class was listening now, and the teachers in the hallway took their leave, Flitwick grinning widely. "You can, of course, de-transfigure, but even Human-to-Human transfiguration is more-or-less impossible via wand magic. There are several reasons for this… unless you'd like to explain for me, Mr. House."

"Oh no," said House, sitting on the edge of another student's desk, blocking his view of the front. "You're doing fine, I'm learning so much."

Leda scowled. "The primary reasons are twofold. Obviously, just as it is impossible to convert a human into a rock or inanimate object without killing them, it is impossible to do the inverse. Animals are an exception as we generally share organs, and with careful study, a prospective animagus can carefully monitor their transfigurations and…"

House, having already grasped the concepts involved during the summer, was the first to notice the girl on the floor, who had, unnoticed in what qualified in a classroom as a hubbub, silently fallen unconscious in a puddle of water. He looked at her for a moment and poked her inquisitively with his walking stick.

"Is there a… story behind this?" he asked, making sure he had interrupted Professor Leda mid-sentence. The Professor turned, followed his stick, and sprang to the girl's side.

"Miss Chandler?" she asked, as she shook her. The girl sleepily opened her eyes. "Emily," she said straight to her, "are you all right?"

"Professor?" she asked, confused. "I'm… no, I'm sorry, I'm just… exhausted, I guess."

Professor Leda helped the girl to her feet, and with a wave of her wand conjured a towel to help the girl dry herself off. "Forget about the project, Emily," Leda said, nudging Emily back to her seat. She walked awkwardly for a moment, and every step of the way she was watched by House's careful eye.

"Hey," he said, after she had lurched halfway across the classroom. She turned to face him, and he began to recite: "'The term "human anatomy" comprises a consideration of the various structures which make up the human organism. In a restricted sense it deals merely with the parts which form the fully developed individual—'" But before House had a chance to further quote Henry Gray, Emily Chandler slipped suddenly into sleep, slumping first against a desk and would have fallen to the ground if not caught by a classmate.

Professor Leda rushed forward to check her student again, and instructed the student that had caught her to take her to the hospital wing, a look of intense concern on her face.

House, grinning, followed.

* * *

_I'd like to add a note here, just so we're all on the same page. While there aren't really enough clues to guess at the solution yet, feel free to guess at the solutions in the reviews at any time! However, if you make a guess about the solution in a review, be aware that I just can't comment on it until the solution is actually out! It's nothing personal (because you're all awesome for reading/playing along!), I just want to make sure the mystery stays a mystery until the dramatic reveal! _

_No promises on when Part 2 will be out. Keep in mind this part took a few months, but the fact that this is out will probably nag at me, so it won't be that long. We'll see when we see!_


	6. Change in the Maze Part 2

"An overdose of sleeping draught could stick with the patient over several days."

"Or maybe she's just tired."

"There are a lot of energy-draining curses as well."

"And there's this thing—I just can't remember what it's called but there's this… _thing_, and it makes you all… tired. When it stares at you."

"_Or maybe she's just normally tired._"

House lifted up his walking stick, held it carefully over the nearby table, and slammed it down like a gavel. The sound echoed slightly through the walk-in supply cabinet he had absconded as an office. The kids jumped in their seats and stopped talking immediately.

"…all right," he said, looking almost as tired as the patient. "You've all read the first thing I wrote on the board. Very good. If you look closely, however, you'll find that there are, in fact, several things written after that."

The kids looked ashamed, except Hailley who just sighed. House was right, of course. The board read, in full: "DROWSINESS", "PALLOR", "SHORTNESS OF BREATH" (which House had already connected to say "ANEMIA" though they were ignoring this) and in slightly bigger letters: "SUBDERMAL VEGETATION GROWTH". Wilson and Madame Pomfrey had discovered several small, fragile shoots of what seemed to be plants growing out of parts of the patient's body that were not normally covered by clothing, like her wrists and neck. House wished someone would start talking about it, but his so-called team seemed determined to go through the list in order.

"I still don't see why you're jumping straight to anaemia, House," Wilson said from the side, trying to play referee.

"Thank you!" said Hailley throwing her arms in the air. "The pallor's as simple as her staying indoors all summer, the tiredness is just staying up late and the shortness of breath…"

"I'd be short of breath if I had vines growing out of my side," Ian joked sarcastically.

"She doesn't have _vines_ growing out of her," snapped Toby. "Right Dr. House?" House ignored him.

"Right," replied Hailley, running her hand through her hair slowly like she always did when she was thinking. "So that's three symptoms that might be irrelevant—"

House rolled his eyes. "Except they're not, because she's anaemic."

"—and you're pulling a blood problem out of nowhere because—"

"He's not pulling a blood problem out of nowhere!" Toby protested.

Hailley gritted her teeth. "—because you don't know what to do with someone sprouting flowers than we do!"

House banged his stick-gavel a few times until the room had quieted down, and then he pointed to Toby. "Okay, first? The role of kiss-ass that agrees with everything I say has already been filled in my New Jersey outfit. Second," he pointed to Hailley, "unless you have an explanation for the plants, I want you three running tests for anaemia." He paused, sighed and looked at Wilson. "What are the tests for anaemia?"

"I don't know," Wilson admitted. "I'll go talk to Madame Pomfrey."

He left, and House immediately rounded on the students. "Blood loss doesn't seem that likely in a world where you can close a wound with three seconds and a week of training. Start researching magical causes of blood cell loss and we'll see if this is going a route I'm not familiar with." They stared back at him, Hailley with a slight glare, and he waved his walking stick in the air. "Go!"

They scattered, and House was about to wander off and maybe find something to drink when the door opened behind him.

"Mr. House, we need to talk." It was Madame Pomfrey, whose arms were cross and expression harsh. "I see you're having another one of your pow-wows." He considered just… walking away.

Madame Pomfrey walked past him and began to collect clean sheets from the shelves. "All right, House," she said as matter-of-factly as always. "We're both doctors, and you helped me with Mr. Tanner. There's room for all of us in here. McGonagall's agreed to institute you and your kids as a school club if you follow _my _orders.  
That will give you the freedom to move around."

"So I can work on patients again?" he asked.

"Absolutely not. If I see you or your – need I remind you, _volunteer _– assistants, I'll throw the whole lot of you to the squid. Make no mistake," she said as she went to gather new pillowcases, "if I see any of your assistants so much as touch their wands in this wing, that'll be the end of it."

House swallowed a jab and nodded. "Fair's fair."

"And no trying to get James to do anything either. His permissions are only just a bit less limited."

"I don't actually think getting Wilson to magic the patient would help anything," House replied. Madame Pomfrey made a sound almost like a shudder, and refused to meet his eyes.

"So that's more or less it," she said to change the subject. "You follow hospital wing rules, you follow my orders, and I'll give you an ear if you ever have any theories."

House took a step forward. "So we don't touch or magic the patient."

"Correct, unless I give one of your older students permission."

"Not even to analyse?"

"Mr. Wilson or I will do that for now, thank you very much."

"And in return, we'll both pretend to be listening when the other talks."

"More or less."

They stared one another down for a while, the tension in the air punctuated by the stale sent of the unguents, potions and salves kept on the shelves, when sudden House asked "Can we keep the room?"

She looked from him to the table twice before replying: "…no food."

House turned to examine his new piece of real estate in detail, and Madame Pomfrey turned to leave, but as she pushed the door open she stopped again. "By the way," she said on the way out. "I told the students as they passed. You were right. She is anaemic."

House nodded. "That puts them exactly where they were supposed to be five minutes ago."

"They're students," Pomfrey replied with a slight tone of surprise, but then, with a patient tone: "They'll learn in time."

House scoffed, and Madame Pomfrey turned to leave. Behind her, he picked a bottle of Skele-gro off the shelf. She shouted back without turning as the door shut behind her. "And don't touch anything!"

And the door slammed shut.

* * *

"Rio. I spent two weeks in Rio de Janeiro with my family."

Emily Chandler had looked better. She was clean, magic saw to that, but she was haggard and pale, with heavy bags under her eyes. Her blonde hair was dry, as Madame Pomfrey was not, as she reminded him, a hairdresser, but it was clean, and she made to push it away from her face so that she could turn to the side and take the glass of water her boyfriend held up for her.

Robin Travers had certainly lost the vim he had had when Wilson had first seen him, in the Leaky Cauldron dancing with the other patrons. He looked almost as tired as his girlfriend, though thankfully not as pale and lacking the intermittent pockmarks that indicated where a bud or leaf had tried to grow.

"Well that rules out 'indoors all summer'," Wilson said to himself. He checked his pad, looking at the notes he had made concerning House's theories. "Did you happen to encounter any magic in Brazil you weren't familiar with?"

"How do you mean?"

"I mean…" he was not really sure how to phrase this, "did anyone cast any spells on you that you hadn't seen before, or did you drink any potions…?"

"Nnnot that I can think of," she replied. "I mean, they wash with cleaning charms like everyone else, you know?"

"Any foods you were unfamiliar with?"

"Well…" she thought. "Sure, a lot of them. But nothing no one else didn't eat."

"Well…" Wilson could not help but remember that he had only been at Hogwarts a year and had already encountered a case where only one serving was tainted, "I'd like you to give me a list of anything you can remember, if that's all right."

She nodded, and Robin said, "We got it, doc."

"Thank you," Wilson said, and made a note on his pad. "So…" he said as casually as he could, "have you two been together long?"

"Two years," Robin answered at once, though Emily immediately amended:

"Well… two years in November."

"Right," Robin said. "Hogsmeade weekend."

"Of course," Wilson said with a nod. He was familiar with the village, but out of respect for his classmates, he had never been there himself. "And how was your summer, Robin?"

He shrugged. "Nothing special. Just hung out at home, worked at a Muggle hardware store doing this and that."

Wilson smiled. "Summer jobs, I've been there. Well…" he said, standing up, "I'm going to need that list."

Emily nodded from the bed. "I'll see what I can do."

"Do you need some parchment and a quill?"

"It's okay, sir," said Robin, who reached into the schoolbag he had set at one side of his chair. He pulled out a quill, ink, a scrap of parchment and a Charms textbook to write on, and Wilson nodded, then stepped briefly to the opposite end of the room to give them a moment to write the list in semi-privacy, though he kept an eye on them as she composed the list. He walked to Madame Pomfrey's desk, and was about to update some of the other patient's files (a third year had been admitted to the ward with elongated eyebrows stuck out a foot in both directions, and a sixth year with an invisible left foot), when he was suddenly interrupted by the sound of muffled voices.

"Look, we have to step back and look at the basics," he made out at last. It was Hailley Gauge, House's eldest assistant, and she was in the storage room. "Transfiguration is when something is created or changed, Charms is when something is modified. She's a human, not a beanstalk, so it can't be Charms, and Potions is a subclass of Charms."

"So it's Transfiguration," said another voice. Wilson knew that one, it was Ian.

"Or Dark Arts," Hailley clarified with a cautious overhead. "I mean, Dark Arts is pretty much everything else, except with more evil."

"That's one way to put it," Ian acknowledged.

Curious, Wilson got up and opened the door, and found not just the two of them, Ian's feet up on the table, but Toby, sitting the room, morosely pondering their twiddling fingers.

"…What's going on?" he asked at last.

"We're diagnosing!" Toby said with a smile that appeared and disappeared just as quickly.

"We, uh…" Ian bit his lip.

Toby finished. "…we don't know what we're doing."

Wilson hung his head. "Where's House?"

"We don't know," Hailley replied, her arms crossed and her eyes on a nearby shelf. "He said to figure out if the girl was anaemic and then just vanished."

"She is," said Wilson.

The three of them immediately responded in chorus. "We know."

Wilson looked over his shoulder to check back on the pair in the hospital wing, before turning back. "Look, here's my advice: if you want to help House, talk to the teachers involved in what you're looking into. Go talk to Professor Leda, and tomorrow I'll talk to Professor Longbottom about these leaves. Other than that…" he checked over his shoulder once again, "keep in mind that this didn't reach House because Madame Pomfrey likes doing verbal tangos with him."

They looked to one another, clearly too shy to actually do the job, so Wilson stepped out of the door and gestured towards it, and held the pose until they actually got up and started to walk.

"I think…" started Toby, as they made it into the hallway, "that we should focus on the fatigue."

Hailley rested her head in her hand. "Look, Worm." He looked up at her, even though she had never addressed him like that before, the same layer of underlying enthusiasm on his face. "If you're so confident in everything House says, maybe you could at least _listen_ to what he's saying. The girl's anaemic."

"Well… I don't know what that means."

Hailley groaned, and her hand slipped up her face into her hair. "Look, why don't you just… go to the library and look it up?"

"Can't you just explain it to me?"

"It means her red blood cell count or haemoglobin is low," Ian replied automatically. Hailley lifted her hand a bit to throw him a confused look. "I've been studying," he said vaguely. "I-internet."

"In-what?" Toby asked.

Ian reached out and gave him a pat on the shoulder – a fairly level reach considering neither had yet hit puberty. "Maybe you should just go look it up."

Toby nodded, but piped up, "but what if the fatigue isn't just because of the… the whatever? What if she's tired because she's… not eating enough?"

Hailley pondered this for a moment. "You think she's… not eating?"

"Well…" Toby blushed slightly, and he began to dangle one foot. "Not so much like that, but… I dunno." He began to slur words together. "Maybe I should go look that up, I'll see you later!" And he ran off before they could coordinate a plan on when exactly that meeting would be.

Hailley growled to herself over her teammate's behaviour, and drove her hand so far up her head, almost in an attempt to flip her hair over from one side to the other.

"Does that help?" Ian asked.

"…no," she admitted.

"Well, maybe we should go talk to Professor Le—"

"Okay, look," Hailley interrupted. "I'm sorry, but look: I appreciate that you're taking this seriously enough to do the research, but I really have to go somewhere and think. Alone."

"Uh… yeah," he replied, but she caught him pointing behind her. She wheeled, and saw House looking down on her. He looked at her for a long time, and then pointed at her mussed hair.

"Attractive. You'll be beating them off with a stick now."

She barred her teeth at him and hurried to correct her hair, and he walked past her to stand between the two of them. As she worked, she asked him: "What, 'beat them off with a stick' and no handjob joke?" Ian suddenly flinched.

House sniffed. "If that's what's on your mind, you might want to think a bit more my way instead of just dismissing it." He pointed his walking stick at her. "Doesn't that shirt you're wearing go hand in hand with a big set of coke-bottle glasses or something?"

Even though she was wearing her robes on top of her shirt – a shirt with the iconic _The Sims_ crystal plum-bob – Hailley crossed her arms and looked away.

She muttered, half to him but more to herself, "Next I bet you'll be telling me to focus more on cleavage and enlargement charms than diagnostics. You'd like that, wouldn't you, you crazy…"

The tips of Ian's ears went pink, but House shrugged. "The word you're looking for is 'ephebophile', and no, I would not make that suggestion, because sexual harassment is just what the crook-nosed old lady needs to boot me out of here. That is why I am going to be on my best behaviour in regards to this school, its teachers, and any comments, even accurate ones, about your A-cups."

Ian's blush creeped down his ears and onto his face, and Hailley's glare intensified, but House had changed the subject already. "All right now, out with it. What are you doing wandering the halls?"

Ian tried to talk, but it came out sputtering and shaky in his nervousness. "Y-y-you'd didn't give us anything t-to _do_, so we were just…"

"Well," House said, "now I'm here to give you something to do. I need you to break into Emily Chandler's dorm."

"What?"

"Huh?"

"Ah, good," House said with a smile as they both snapped back to attention. "Eye contact again. I can see the fear."

"You can't get us to break into Hufflepuff House!" Ian said, angry.

"Yeah!" Hailley agreed. "And how isn't that 'stuff you'll get thrown out for?'"

"I don't think I said I would be doing it," House answered her, and to Ian said, "work on… intuition. And bribery, if you have to."

"What do you mean?" Ian asked, not really wanting the answer.

"Your friend Marie," he explained. "She's a Hufflepuff girl, right?"

"But we can't—" Ian spat out.

"That's funny," House interrupted, "because I think you can. I need to know where she was over the summer." He turned and started to walk away.

Hailley spoke up. "Mr. Wilson said she said she was in Rio over the summer."

House scoffed over his shoulder, and simply walked away without clarification, his walking stick tapping echoes down the hall as he went.

* * *

"Tobias, your Transfiguration grade is… well…"

If there was anything Professor Leda truly lacked, it was bite, in the proverbial bark-or-bite metaphor sense. She drummed the fingers on her left hand against her leg under the desk, but stopped when the large red ring she wore on her pointer finger began to drum up against the underside. A lock of grey hair, too grey for forty, she thought, hung from one side of her head, and it was becoming phenomenally distracting.

"Certainly, I can give you my professional opinion," she explained, "but I'm not sure you'll be able to follow." There was a tiny voice at the back of her head, trying to talk her calmly into turning this into a lesson for the boy, to encourage him to redouble his efforts in her subject, but every time she tried her tongue stuck, and nothing came out.

"I'll do my best, Professor Leda," Toby said, standing at attention at the front of the desk.

"Well, it's as you say: the plant growth must be Transfigurative in nature, and it's obviously not an illusion or Madame Pomfrey would have nipped it in the bud… so to speak."

"Right."

"Well, I'm not much for Medicine, Tobias," she said, "but I think there might be something to be said about dealing with the plant itself, rather than figuring out which one it is. The longer that thing is in Miss Chandler's body, the worse off she'll be."

A brief moment of worry passed over Toby's face, but it was gone just as quickly. "I think if we know which plant it is, ma'am, we'll know how to deal with it, won't we?"

"I suppose…" Her fingers stopped drumming. "But if that's the case, why are you here instead of talking to Professor Longbottom?"

"Well…" Toby looked to one side and practically held his gaze in the most incompetent of poker faces Professor Leda had ever seen. "We… were worried that the leaves might be… unique to her."

"What on earth do you mean?" she asked.

"Well it's Transfiguration, right?" he said, "and she's been indoors, in colder weather… and I figured… well since she was growing leaves and all and she's been so tired and… and so forth…"

Professor Leda was beginning to get quite cross with her third year student's digressional ramblings, and mustered enough anger to slap her hand on the table, stopping him mid-drawl.

"Mr. Shor," she said with her full teacher's voice, full of vim and authority. "In the academic world, we do not pursue unfounded theories, collecting evidence and forcing it to adhere to our biases. Either you spit out this line you're pursuing so it can be observed by the both of us, or get out!"

Tobias flinched, and seemed just about to speak when, in a show of abysmal timing, Professor Longbottom stepped into the room. Professor Leda's head snapped up, grey eyes searing at him, and he backed straight up in the still closed half of the double doors that led into the classroom. Unfortunately, Toby turned to follow her gaze.

"Professor Longbottom!" he greeted. Leda scowled, her hand, still flat against the desk, pulled back and gripped the edge in a tiff over her inability to hold students' attentions when it was most important.

"Good morning, Toby," Professor Longbottom greeted. He walked forward at a bit of an angle to avoid approaching Professor Leda in a straight line, until he stood roughly at Toby's side. He had dirt on his face, and had obviously come straight from the greenhouses. "I'm not entirely surprised to find you here."

"Oh?" Toby asked.

"Yes, I was just speaking to Mr. Wilson. He had me take a look at these leaves." He reached out with a garden-gloved hand and set a pile of slightly dried leaves onto the desk. "I wanted you to have a look at them, Professor," he said to Leda. "They seem natural enough, but I don't recognize them, and I wanted to be sure they weren't magically generated."

Leda shook her head automatically, without even touching her wand. "The plant itself might be magically generated," she said, "but it's been too long for me to test individual leaves. These have been naturally grown, whatever the source."

"So you agree," he said.

"With what?"

"Mr. Wilson and I decided the best way to treat the girl would be to find the plant's roots."

"Well… yes," Leda said, "if it's natural or magical, we'd be able to deal with it from there with a few quick spells."

"That's just the problem," Longbottom said. "Where on earth is it growing? It's a magical plant one way or another, since it's not dead from lack of sunlight."

Toby piqued up. "But would this… plant…" he started, "be weak from lack of it?"

"Certainly," said the Herbology teacher. "I mean, she hasn't exactly been leaving its leaves out in the sunlight for the fun of it. But it's still going. That means it's a durable magical plant getting some sunlight and is firmly rooted in… something."

"But what?" asked Leda. "I don't think Poppy would have missed it if the girl had a clump of fertilizer where her lung used to be."

"I'm not sure," he admitted, "but Doctor Wilson said something about wanting to check out something of his own, and returned to his dorm. I figured he was the expert when it came to people, so I left him to his own. But mark my words, one way or another, that plant has its roots somewhere."

_Unless_, thought Toby, _it doesn't _need_ to have its roots somewhere_. As his teachers began a long and boring conversation about the nature of plants in Transfiguration, he slunk off back to his own dorm for some research of his own.

* * *

"Penny for your thoughts, James," said David in the study hall the next day.

"What?" Wilson asked. He had been lost in his own thoughts, staring slightly down the table as some of his classmates hovered around the glass tankard he had filled with water and used to house a cutting of his spider vine plant to show to Professor Longbottom. It was thriving even in the glass and had grown over the edge and would curl delicately around the fingers of anyone that touched it.

"I said, 'penny for your thoughts'."

"I hope you're not thinking about Emily Chandler," said Marie, who had just approached the table and sat down next to her friends. She began to lay out her books, as well as to toss both of them apples she had gathered somewhere, along with a copy of the Daily Prophet with a cover that read "AURORS ARREST MAD RODRICK" and showed a moving photo of a young man with dark hair trying to clear a crowd of photographers while two older-looking Aurors kept a close guard on an insane looking Wizard. "I'd like to think _some people_ I know can think about something else."

They all looked down the hall to Ian, Hailley and Toby, who were whispering over their homework. They seemed involved, at least in the fact that they were arguing.

"Would you believe," she said, "that that Gauge girl had the nerve to ask me to break into Emily's dorm to search for, and I quote, 'clues'? What is wrong with them?"

Wilson groaned. "House. House is what's wrong with them."

House, of course, was nowhere near his new team, but was rather at the other end of the room, openly talking to his Slytherin friends in a business-negotiation style way, as always. Wilson sighed.

"This is what he does to people. He'll turn them all into something like him if they don't stop him themselves."

David nodded. "I'll be the first to admit Ian's been a bit whacked. He spends all summer pouring over books, and then when he gets here, it's like he can't decide if he's still interested or not! Last night he's all 'House is a big fat git, you know?' but this morning he's all looking at the staircase to the girl's dorm and I'll be damned if he wasn't trying to work out a way to get up it."

"Why?" Marie asked, biting into her own apple.

"Girls stairs turn into a chute if a boy tries to climb them," he explained.

"Oh," she said, and then laughed. "There are no stairs in our dorm."

"Oh?"

She shook her head. "You'd just get glued to the doorknob."

David couldn't help himself, and began to snicker, and soon the two were describing, in detail, the scene that would occur in the morning if two of House's crew were found grafted to the girl's doorknob. Wilson's eyes strayed again, until what he was looking for finally caught his eye.

"He's doing it again," he heard David say from the side. "Bloke keeps staring into space like we're not here. James!"

But Wilson ignored him, as the opportunity arose and he flagged down Professor Slughorn, who was watching the hall for the period.

"Ah," said the rotund Professor. "Good morning James!" He then glanced at the opposite end of the table and, forgetting the boy's name and vaguely remembering the girl's but not remembering who she was related to that, via courtesy, demanded he make an effort to do this remembering, simply curtly nodded to the both of them. "Is there something the matter?"

"I have a question that's been bothering me for a while now…" Wilson explained. "It's sort of scientific… and sort of philosophical."

"Well!" said Slughorn, pulling up an empty chair. "Ask away! I do appreciate a good… multidisciplinary question."

Wilson nodded as his friends looked on. "It's about something the Sorting Hat said to me…"

"Ah, the Hat! Wonderful device. I remember when I was sorted like it was yesterday. It was at that very moment," he explained, "that the idea for my, ahem, 'Slug Club' was formed in my head. Yes, you see, it was like I had been selected to join a prestigious club myself, among many prestigious members to whom I grew to look up to quite fondly. Yes, Slytherin House has certainly acquired a rather rueful reputation in… the past half century or so, but I don't think you truly understand its every facet unless you were there to see the likes of Andromedus, Gunther Cabbae, and of course, Professor Black at our helm. It was a fascinating time, really. Excellent time to be young, not, of course, that this generation does not show great—"

Wilson, who had been gesturing for the Professor to give him a chance to speak, simply began himself in hopes that it would stop Slughorn entirely. "When I was talking to the Hat, it asked me something peculiar. It asked… 'Do you think being a Squib will affect where I place you?'"

"That's an odd question," Marie said.

"Well," said Slughorn, acknowledging her, "I don't actually find it that surprising. The Hat, after all, has to gauge a number of properties, and it has to do its best to gather from not just who you are, but who you will be when you grow up. There's little room for error with one opportunity, so asking for actual input is hardly surprising. But phrasing would be very important. Say I suggested to the Hat, for example, that I wanted to be in Slytherin. The Hat, instead, might see this as a decisive gesture, and since decisiveness is a trait of Gryffindor, it might place me there, instead."

"So if you said…" Wilson thought aloud, "that you wanted to be in Slytherin because you… wanted to see what made them 'Slytherins', per se…"

Slughorn nodded. "The Hat would consider that to be a Ravenclaw-like trait, precisely. Or, perhaps based on your phrasing, it could be a Slytherin trait, or a Hufflepuff, or even back to Gryffindor. This is no science; we're simply… a few old men discussing things beyond our ken, for the sake of our own entertainment." He had evidentially forgotten once again, that he was just across the table from a pair of preteens. "Now back to your situation, I, for example, had this spring immediately to my head when you said the question, which is what the Hat would read: that being that yes, of course that would impact your placement, as your inability to form complicated spells would, presumably, hamper your ability to function in certain high-maintenance Houses, such as, just as an example, Sytherin."

"That's bollocks, that is," David said from his side. "Mr. Wilson's got as much right to be anywhere he deserves to be, and I'll tell any hat that says otherwise 'till it knows what's what."

Wilson could not help but feel reassured at his friend's dramatic show of support, thought Marie just shrugged to him, sheepishly. Slughorn pointed to him.

"Now this is excellent, our friend Daniel here, being so recently sorted into Gryffindor is providing what is likely the perfect Gryffindor-type answer to the Hat's question." Well, Wilson thought, Slughorn had got David's identity half right. "But in the end, this is all very academic. If I were you, Dr. Wilson, I would put my faith in one thing that you may be ignoring as a former member of Muggle society, for as your Dr. House has pointed out, we Wizards have been a bit reticent when it comes to pointing out the tiny changes that make all the difference. For my part, the Hat is a tried and tested piece of magical craftsmanship, and I have known it to be right decades later not just for students that were raised in this environment, for those that, over the course of two very unfortunate wars and the paranoia over the distant threat of Gellert Grindelwald, left our school. They were as much Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, Ravenclaws or Slytherins as they would have been if they had stayed for seven years as they were having left only a few weeks after their sorting, for safety's sake. After all: Magic is as reliable in its refined form as how, to a student it may seem, urm… unrefined."

At that precise moment, as the word 'unrefined' was leaving Slughorn's mouth, an explosion of noise and loose parchment erupted from the side table as a house elf apparated into existence right on top of the table.

"Mr. Wilson?" the elf asked, lying upside down on the papers, before spinning around when Wilson gave her a confused nod in response. "Mistress Pomfrey sent me," the elf explained. She said, uhh…" The elf began to count off on her fingers, trying to recall a list of some sort. "Emily Chandler… blood… in… urine… need… your… help…"

"I'll be right there," he said, taking to his feet. Slughorn, alarmed, had already pushed back his chair.

"Wait!" shrieked the elf. "There was one more. Eee… rrrr…. Rrrree…"

"Renal failure," said a voice behind Wilson. He turned to find House standing there, his team having already gathered from the opposite direction. "Her kidneys are shutting down." He turned, and his team followed him, Wilson in slow pursuit. He caught up with them as he rounded a corner and downed a pill.

"Where did you get that?" Wilson asked him.

"Get what?"

"You know what I mean," Wilson said, getting into step beside him. "Filch confiscated all of them when he caught you with them on the last of school last year. He must have searched you on the way in."

"Confiscated what?" House repeated, innocently, and refused to speak another word until they had reached the Hospital Wing.

* * *

The Hospital Wing quickly devolved into chaos. In the main wing, behind a white shutter, Madame Pomfrey shouted directions at James Wilson for specific potions, tools and whatnot as her patient, unconscious, wavered dramatically between magically induced health and the very worst symptoms of acute renal failure, all while sprouting new leaves at a dramatic rate, and even small vine-like stems. In the storage room, the meeting had quickly become a shouting match.

"I specifically told you to find your way into her dormitory."

"And we couldn't do it, okay?" Hailley shouted at House.

"We shouldn't have considered it anyway!" Ian tried to shout over both of them. "This is insane, and it's illegal too."

"If you're going to let that get in your way, I really don't think you're ready to work in medicine," House said to him.

"Guys…" Toby said, watching the door.

Ian had formed his hands into fists. "Why is this so important to you, anyway? Are you not happy unless you're teaching a bunch of pickpockets?"

"I need to know where she was during the summer!"

"She was in Rio!"

"She's left something out," Hailley said then, quietly.

"What?" Ian asked, abashed.

"Nothing makes sense from Rio," she said. "She has to have skipped something. The… trip to the airport, a stopover in Cuba, I don't know."

"Really?" Ian looked back and forth between them. Hailley nodded. "But… why don't we just ask her?"

"Because it wouldn't be insane enough for him."

"Oh please," House said, "just because you don't have the guts to do a simple B&E…"

"Hey, stop picking on her, you git," Ian said.

"Galahad," said Hailley, "piss off. Fight your own battles, would you? And besides, we can just ask her when Madame Pomfrey gets her awake again."

House stopped in the process of adding to his list of symptoms to give her a look.

"What?" she asked.

"…nothing. All right, we'll talk to her when she's 'awake again'."

They had a while to wait. Dinner came and went, and they left the wing to get some. Ian made a point of grabbing a handful of food for Robin Travers, who spent the whole time in the Hospital Wing, staring worryingly at the shutter Madame Pomfrey had closed around his girlfriend. This resulted in Hailley calling him "Galahad" again, which he accepted without pause, and they returned to the storage room and, after another long wait, the hallway. At last, Wilson emerged.

"She's up," he said to the group. "Exhausted, but up. Madame Pomfrey's a miracle worker with that wand but it's unbelievable… It was more intense than any treatment for renal failure I've ever seen, but she says if all's well, she shouldn't have any more problems from her kidneys. …There's so much I have left to learn. I swear though," he said to House, "something was off when we tried to figure out what was wrong. We didn't open her up, didn't need to, but when we checked with our wands to see what was wrong, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with the kidneys. If it weren't for the symptoms she started showing today…"

House looked to his team. "All right," he said, "we'll try it your way."

He stepped inside, the others following him, and found Robin sitting next to Emily, her eyes sunk and shoulders drooped with exhaustion.

"Excuse me," House said, "are you Robin Travers?" His team looked to him in half-disguised confusion, and Robin nodded. Madame Pomfrey, looking almost as tired as her patient, was sitting at her desk filling out a report, and she looked up. House continued. "Professor Marchbanks is looking for you in his office."

"I-in the dungeons?" Robin asked. "That's so far away… Right now?"

House nodded. "He said it was urgent."

"Okay…" he said, and patted Emily's hand. "I'll be right back," he said, and left the room.

"Hi," House said to Emily, at last. "I'm Doctor House. I'd like to know where you were during the summer."

Hailley stepped up to clarify. "We were wondering if you might have been anywhere at all besides Rio de Janeiro for really any amount of time. Stopovers, maybe into the rural areas…"

House raised a hand to silence her. "Let me rephrase: we need to know where you were to treat you, your boyfriend is gone… now where the hell were you all summer?"

House's team looked even more confused than ever, Ian looked particularly mortified, and Emily hung her head and adjusted her position on the bed.

"I… how?"

House shook his head. "Professor Marchbanks doesn't really want him, we really don't have time for this."

Emily looked away, and to everyone's surprise, started to cry. "I was with Paco," she admitted. "He was showing me the magical community in Brazil. We walked straight through the jungle to all kinds of magical sites, old ruins, hidden wizarding towns…"

"Who's…" Hailley's eyes flicked between Emily and House, who was completely neutral. "Who's Paco?"

"My pen pal," she said without answering. "We met through a Transfiguration Today study group, he's a genius. About twenty-nine," she said. "Since I turned seventeen in May we decided I should go visit."

"When you… turned seventeen," Ian repeated. He started to pace irritably.

"Galahad…" Hailley cautioned.

"I just don't like where this is going, Hailley," he said.

She lowered her eyes. "That's because you're twelve, and I'm starting to think you're too close-minded to know what you're talking about, the way you blaze up like a strawberry whenever someone mentions sex. Seventeen year olds are _adults_, Ian, they can do what they want." He said nothing.

"So there's no family in Brazil?" Toby asked.

"Well…" she said, throwing Ian and Hailley nervous glances, "technically, but we never saw them."

"Did…" Toby bit his lip, feeling his pet theory teetering on the edge. "Your friend Paco, he's good at Transfiguration?"

Emily sniffed, wiped her eyes, and nodded.

"Did he ever… cast any spells on you?"

"Well… yeah." She shrugged. "It's how we know one another. We played around…" Ian's face suddenly reddened again, and Hailley threw up her arms and left him aside. "That's not what I meant!" Emily shouted at him. "We'd entertain one another when we were in the jungle with nothing else to do all… day long. We'd change colour, we'd morph a few rocks, and we'd help each other if we were cut or hurt, as best we could." She turned a bit and gestured to her side, slightly on the back. "Got a bad one here when I rolled into a tree once and got cut on a branch, and there isn't even a scar. And… he'd make little illusions, he could do whole shows. They're his specialty."

She stopped, and there was a sudden awkward silence. Emily sniffed from time to time, and the only other sound was the sound of Pomfrey's nervous quill, but suddenly Emily exploded. "What is your _problem_?" she shrieked at Ian. "Do you think, for one second, that you can say something to me that I haven't already said?"

Ian looked confused, for while he had been raging privately to himself, he had not said a word to the patient. Hailley sighed.

"I went to Brazil to… find myself," Emily muttered in her tears. "I wanted to grow up without Robin… _smothering_ me! And I spent time with Paco, and we had fun, and I felt wonderful about myself until I got back here and Robin was here and…. Rrraagh!"

Ian looked to his colleagues for advice, but all he got was from Hailley. "I think you and your conservative ass should leave the damn room, Galahad, learn a little thing about bedside manner."

"Hey!" Ian snapped. "Believe it or not, I don't care what she… did with her friend in South America, I just don't think she should've lied to her boyfriend to do it!"

House, who had been watching quietly next to Toby, groan and rolled his eyes. "Have we really, really known one another for a whole year and you haven't learned this yet?" he asked. Ian looked him in the eye, and House frowned, before walking briskly towards the storage room. To no one in particular, he muttered: "Everybody lies."

* * *

_Stop! You now know everything House does. Can you figure out what happened to Emily Chandler? You have two weeks from today to think it over, talk it over with friends and work out your solution. The solution has already been written (so you can't influence it!) and will be posted at the end of those two weeks (October 5th, in the afternoon Eastern Time. Probably 2pm)._

_Remember that House knows everything you know about every scene. Whether or not he was there isn't a factor: someone told him or he worked it out some other way. He's House, after all!_

_For convenience's sake (and because I sometimes have to create new kinds of magic), all magical knowledge, new or from the books, that you need to work out the solution is in this fic. If it's magical but not in the fic (even if it's an oversight), it's not part of the solution! However, real world knowledge is up to you! And that's it! You have two weeks!_


	7. Change in the Maze Solution

"What's going on?" Wilson asked as House and his team suddenly burst into the room near the Hospital Wing he was using to catch his breath.

"Moron here can't keep his temper," Hailley said, gesturing behind her to Ian.

"Look, I'm sorry, all right? Why are you taking this so personally?"

"I am _not_!"

Toby, sheepishly, took a step away from Hailley before saying "Actually, Hailley, you kinda are." She glared a searing glare at him that sent him scurrying for cover behind Wilson.

"Children…" House cautioned, walking slowly in last of all, carrying his chart with him. "We must be calm."

"_Mr. House!_" shrieked Madame Pomfrey, the moment she opened the door. "If you can't control your team around your patients, I assure you that you will never set foot in my hospital wing again!"

Ian and Hailley both shrank suddenly away, a tear in the former's eye.

"Madame Pomfrey," Toby said in a tiny voice. "I-I'm not 100% sure, but I th-think I know what's wrong with Emily."

"Well?" she said, with no loss of temper, which brought a smile to House's face. "Out with it!"

"I… well, her friend Paco was a master Transfigurist. She's been exhausted, unenergetic and stuff, ever since she came inside and started clipping those leaves. And there's nowhere in her body a plant could be growing. It's possible that he may have… urm… accidentally… started turning her into a plant."

His two teammates looked to him with surprise at his coherent theory, and were clearly running it through in their minds. But House, after a surprised pause, laughed.

"What? Really?"

"What's the matter, House?" Wilson asked.

"Plant/animal transfiguration is impossible!" he said. "It's a fundamental rule! It was right up there on the board with the dead gorilla and shit!"

"Huh?"

"Well, okay, that was a seventh year class, but it's still true. You've got nothing, kid."

Toby's face fell legitimately for the first time House had seen on him, and he backed away.

"Then it must a water based plant," Wilson suggested. "Blood's mostly water, with a magical plant…"

"Could be," House said, "and it would explain the anaemia, but it doesn't explain the renal failure, not unless every other part of her body is failing and no one's told me. I have one that does, though?"

"Well then for goodness sakes, Mr. House," said Madame Pomfrey, "spit it out already! My patient's life may be at stake!"

House pondered the room.

"House," Wilson insisted.

"Just making sure the dramatic tension is right," he said at last. "…all right. Loki weed."

"What?" said Ian.

"It's a plant native to South America," House explained. "It has incredibly sharp cores inside of the seed bulbs. I think our friend in there may have stabbed herself when she and her guy pal were rolling around in the jungle one night." Ian winced, not from any moral qualms but from the obvious effort House was making to direct that shot at him. "She said she got cut by a tree branch, but I don't think so. She got cut by a loki weed, and brushed off a few seeds that were stuck to that core."

"Loki weed…" Wilson said, thinking his way back to the Diagon Gardens, "grows only in dead things, right?"

"Right. Except Emily Chandler's kidneys are perfectly healthy… even when they're failing. Her Brazilian boyfriend slash field medic, on the other hand, is a master illusionist, and not a doctor. Her kidneys have been dying slowly over the past few weeks. He didn't realise how serious the problem was, and fixed it all wrong, then set up his spell to hide it from mommy and daddy and the ball and chain back home. But a magical illusion, even a really good one, can't hide the symptoms of kidney failure."

"So…" Wilson started, "the plant is in her kidney, near the cut?"

"Kidneys," House corrected, with an emphasis on the plural. "One kidney is just organ death, but this thing is spreading, choking and dominating everything it comes across. The body can process urine fine enough with one kidney, with the plants growing out of her happily providing us with a foreign body and an excuse for her to have any infections, that we'd quickly clean up with our wizarding mojo. But now her second kidney is dead or dying, and she needs a new one or she's going to go with it." He turned, as if to leave, and then said over his shoulder, "Oh, you should probably get rid of the plant, too. You know."

Madame Pomfrey watched him leave, absolutely livid with rage. "Those two idiots!" she said to the room around her. "All they needed was a simple trip to the hospital and now… this Paco will hear of this, and so will Miss Chandler as soon as she's healthy enough to appreciate it!"

"Can you fix her, Madame Pomfrey?" Wilson asked.

"Not on my own," she admitted. "I need to call St. Mungo's."

Hailley turned to Toby. "Worm?"

He nodded, enthusiastic and glad to be included again. "I'll go to the owlry!" He was halfway to the door when Madame Pomfrey stopped him.

"Mr. Shor," she called, "the fireplace in my office, please."

"Oh. Oh! Of course." He smiled, nodded, and ran out, and Madame Pomfrey went with him, and Wilson turned off down the hall to go after House. Ian and Hailley were left in the quiet room, alone.

"…so…" he started.

"No," she interrupted. "You listen, I talk. What is wrong with you?" He winced. "You don't behave like that in front of the patient, you idiot! I don't care what you think! You don't even _get it_!"

"Look, I'm sorry, okay?"

"It doesn't matter!" She began to pace. "You don't even get what she's talking about! You're just a dumb kid, doing what? Why are you even here? What, were you bored?" He flinched again, far too telling. "You're supposed to be here for them! Listen you. We don't know one another very well, but I am not going to put up with this _crap_. You don't even understand how… how hard it is for to come out and even talk people every day, okay?" She pointed accusingly, but her finger trembled. "I bet you don't even know what it's like to want someone, or not want to hurt someone you care about. So don't be the jackass she's been hiding from. You're trying to be a _doctor_."

Ian's lower lip trembled, and he opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came to him. Suddenly, a tear came to Hailley's eye, and she backed off slowly. From some last reserve of strength, she whispered. "You don't talk to me until you've grown up," and she slipped through the doors.

* * *

In the Hufflepuff common room, Marie sat on the floor doing her homework, a bunch of bananas and a few peels lying around her. She raised her head when she heard the door open, and to her surprise saw House walk in through it, though was not in the least surprised when he left it swinging open. Wilson soon followed, and came in through the opened door, by which point Marie and House had struck up a half-interested conversation about why he was there.

"Didn't you used to run away whenever someone talked to you?" House was asking, as a change of subject. She shrugged, and continued writing.

"House," Wilson said, "how did you get in here?"

House, eating a banana, shrugged. "Magic?"

Wilson sighed and sat down on the large, comfortable couch that sat opposite the fireplace. "This case is giving me a headache. Did you hear your girl screaming at Ian after we left?"

House shrugged. "Don't care."

"You know, it reminds me of something," Wilson said. "The Sorting Hat said something."

"Oh," Marie said from the ground. "Ask him the thing."

"The thing?" House asked. "Well that's just obscure enough to pique my interest."

Wilson scoffed. "The Hat asked me if I thought my being a Squib should affect my placement in a house."

House chewed his banana as he talked. "Well sure," he said. "I mean, your inability to properly use magic means you'd need a different environment to properly learn how to use what you can. I figured that out a year ago."

"That's a Ravenclaw answer," Marie said with a smile.

"What?" House asked. "What did you say to it?"

"I said 'No.'"

Marie nodded. "But you'll prove it anyway."

"Yes," said Wilson. "That's exactly what I told it. And it went back to something it had been saying earlier. He pointed at Ian and David who were whispering about their friend who had went to Slytherin and said 'It's been over a decade since the war, but look. We still need diligent and compassionate people to be pulled back together.'" He nodded to himself, satisfied the memory was correct. "And then he said 'Hufflepuff.'"

"And here we are," House said, gesturing to the room around him before grabbing another banana.

Wilson sighed. "Here we are."

Suddenly, the fire in the fireplace flashed and turned a bright green. House, the only one in the otherwise empty common room not at all surprised, reached into his pocket and tossed a few wizarding coins into the fire. There was a pause, and then a pill bottle jumped out of the fire, landed on the plush carpeting, and rolled to a stop. The fire died back down to its regular red.

Wilson looked at the pill bottle, incredulous, as House stooped to collect it. "I don't believe you!" he said. "You… and those Slytherins… you've set up a drug smuggling ring!"

"As usual," House said, digging the pill into his half-eaten banana and closing the peel around it, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

* * *

Ian and Hailley sat at opposite ends of the Hospital Wing, ignoring one another, occasionally glancing at the sleeping residents, save for Robin and Emily, who were talking quietly about nothing, Robin holding her close. It was only after a long wait that Toby returned from Pomfrey's office.

"She went to St. Mungo's," he explained to them each, individually, in turn. "She said she'd only be a few minutes, but she has to convince them to loan her a Healer in the middle of the night, so you never know. She was furious at them."

They sat quietly, and waited. And waited. The quiet murmuring of the couple's quiet conversation continued as a silent ambience that drifted past the tension to their ears, and they listened carefully. Neither talked about the trip to South America. They were just talking about classes. No confessions, no apologies, nothing of any substance whatsoever. They almost missed it when she cut off mid-sentence, and it was only gradually that they noticed her hand go to her throat. The three of them rushed to her side and, out of deference for her age if nothing else, let Hailley approach her. She felt her throat, but felt nothing.

"What's going on?" Robin asked.

"I don't know," Hailley said. "Her kidneys, maybe. Maybe the vines are spreading to somewhere else they shouldn't be. Choking her off…" She turned back to her colleagues. "Any spells?" They shook their heads. "Any…" she shook her head to clear it. "Any ideas?" Nothing.

Toby whispered too quietly to be heard. "What do we do?"

* * *

It was cold for June. The wind liked to blow, and catch you when you were least ready for it, and in Hagrid's classes the kids were learning how to knit sweaters for Kneazels. They learned only after they were done that the Kneazels did not like sweaters one little bit. He gave them bonus marks for "durability" based on how intact each sweater has survived the Kneazel counterattack, and everyone passed more or less satisfactorily. Slytherin won the House Cup, thanks in part to their excellent Quidditch performance, and it seemed like only moments after McGonagall had finished her closing statements that everyone was off, carrying their bags out of the castle.

They went down in groups. Hailley and Toby were talking amicably with one another, carrying on a conversation they had started in the hall. Wilson walked with David, Marie and Ian, talking once again about the Quidditch season, which he at least partially understood this time. House walked on his own, though when he saw his friends from Slytherin collecting their bags at the door, he actually turned and tossed them a salute.

At the foot of the hill, a line of carriages waited, students boarding in groups, before taking them down the long road away from Hogwarts, through Hogsmeade, to the train, away back home for another summer.

David, Ian and Marie were so involved in their conversation that they almost bumped full into Hailley and Toby at the foot of the hill. They had stopped, Toby holding gently onto his left arm with his right. They started to walk around them, but stopped when they realised just how still they were standing, and that Ian had stopped just next to them.

They had stopped, just by the carriages, and were looking forward at the spaces between the carriages, where there was nothing at all. Marie nudged Hailley's shoulder, she and David confused by their classmates' sudden stop, but she frankly did not seem to notice. They stared for almost forever, until Wilson reached forward with both hands to guide them as a group.

"C'mon," he said, and led them to the doors. They looked away as they were led inside, and the carriages moved away down the road, as they always had, on their own.

* * *

_And that's chapter 3!_

_A lot of you worked out the meansby which Emily was infected! To be frank, the precise "point out" of her "tree" scar was a last-minute addition post-beta, but I'm glad it was there since so many of you got that far! Unfortunately, no one guessed the plant's identity (I didn't write that scene in the Diagon Gardens for the fun of it, and I promise that you'll always be able to guess the precise injury). Oh well! Congratulations to readers Lucillia, Dreamingfox and funniefriend1245 who guessed at the "tree" being the cause, and to readers KiraiAnca and Valdimarian guessed the injury left some seeds behind. Both of those two also put out some serious thought into the leaves: KiraiAnca realised (which I did not!) that a forest floor rainforest plant would not need a good deal of sunlight, while Valdimarian realised that the plants were growing towards exposed skin to get what sunlight they needed, that the plant was helping to make her anaemic (and suggested the plant was consuming her sugar due to the lack of light, which I also wish I had thought of!). You all did great!_

_Additional congrats to reader _Soul HellFire_ for noticing that there was no way House could be surviving school without hard drugs._

_More behind the scenes information below:_

_Would you believe Toby's suggestion was originally my solution? Emily was going to turn into a lotus, being transfigured by a magical type of lotus, similar to the myth of Dryope. But then BAM! JK shows up with _Tales of Beedle the Bard _and says human to plant transfiguration is impossible. Quick like a whip that woman is, despite the fact that she doesn't even know who I am. I left it in as a red herring, but either it wasn't obvious enough what he was going for, or none of you fell for it (though reader yellulhchicken joked that she was a "were plantcreature", which I suppose is close, lol). I like to think it was the latter, in which case, great job! I'll try harder next time :P._

_Yup, the drunken wizards at The Leaky Cauldron are singing about the _Lambton Worm_, via the old folk song. In Wizarding legends, the worm was either a basilisk or a really, really impressive flobberworm, depending on who you ask. Wilson wouldn't know the song, though, so I mention it here rather than in narration. _

_You'll notice I avoid mentioning how many students are in NEWT Transfiguration, because of Jo's self-admitted shoddy math that makes it impossible to tell how large a Hogwarts year should be (that is: the books imply there should be just a handful, but she and for that matter I always figured there were much more than that). There were only a few people in NEWT Potions but that's not necessarily an indicator for Transfiguration. Feel free to imagine it any way you want – I personally like to think there's about 7 or 8 of them in-fic, even I think I should have wrote in more.._

_House spells "anemia" different than I do in narration ("anaemia"). That's because he's American, and I'm not. It's intentional!_

_Hailley's shirt was originally Kingdom Hearts-related, but if that were the case, I imagine House would be calling her a Disney-loving baby rather than a nerd. This isn't to say House isn't familiar with Kingdom Hearts – he is a gamer after all – it's just that he'd pick the insult rather than bond over something they might have in common. Either way it was meant as an ad for my Kingdom Hearts plot-based fic, "Stains". 358/2 Days (along with an issue about Heartless battles slowing the narrative) has stalled my updating but I'll get back to it soon. Go read it!_

_Wilson being in "study hall" is a pretty Movies-only bit of canon, but it worked for my "obscure which house Wilson ended up in" purposes. Use what you have, you know? _

_If it comes up, "Professor Marchbanks" is related to the Wizenagamot elder who resigned in protest of Umbridge being named High Inquisitor (she was his great-aunt, specifically). It's one of those pure-blood family cobweb-trees. He was supposed to appear in this chapter but I didn't have room, you'll see him next one for sure._

_Lastly, the big one: Neville's scene in the story was originally extended, as he explained the details of how plants got their nutrition, but I felt that a) it was too broad of a hint towards the Loki Weed, and b) he got a large enough scene in the middle of A Stopper In Death. Even if this was more of a Herbology chapter, I have to ration these things. Still, there was very little reason for the plant infesting Emily to _not _be feeding off her blood (like Wilson suggests here and two readers guessed) such that it _had_ to be something weirder. Another such issue from this cut is any lingering problems with the dying kidney: I think a lot of these are covered by the Loki weed's presence mixed with the illusion, but I'm sure I've missed something. My notes actually list a few things that could have cleared all of this up (for example, Wilson was supposed to make a few remarks about symptoms of sepsis) but I think the Neville scene was the largest hit and it bothers me the most. It's part of my not-job here to make sure there are enough clues that people can get the mystery, and so in hindsight cutting this exposition was a definite mistake in that regard._


End file.
